NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

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NATIONAL AND SOCIAL 
PROBLEMS 



BY 
FREDERIC HARRISON 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1908 

All rights reserved 



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LIBRARY of COM 3RE 33 
Two Copies rtecoiyjj 

APR 27 1908 

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21 I4*i 

5&A KXc. Wo, 

COPY 3. 



Copyright, 1908, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotypcd. Published April, 1908. 



Nortooofi ^regs 

J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



TO 

EDWARD SPENCER BEESLY 

AND 

JOHN HENRY BRIDGES 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION 



PAGE 

ix 



PART I 
NATIONAL PROBLEMS 



I. 


Bismarckism : The Policy of Bl 


ood 


AND 


Iron 




3 


II. 


The Duty of England 










35 


III. 


France after War 










70 


IV. 


L£on Gambetta . 










95 


V. 


The Making of Italy . 

Cavour 

Garibaldi . 










113 
126 

142 


VI. 


Afghanistan 










158 


VII. 


The Anti-Aggression League . 










179 


VIII. 


Egypt 










189 


IX. 


The Boer War . ■ . 










219 


X. 


The State of Siege . 










. 223 


XL 


Empire and Humanity 










• 237 



Vlll CONTENTS 

PART II 
SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

ESSAY PAGE 

I. The Limits of Political Economy .... 263 

II. Trades-Unionism 297 

III. Industrial Co-operation 323 

IV. Social Remedies 366 

V. Socialist Unionism 409 

VI. Moral and Religious Socialism 428 



NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

The essential principle of modern society is to bring all politi- 
cal action under the control of moral duty. — Comte. 

INTRODUCTION 

This book — being an appeal to international morality 
and a plea for social regeneration — develops the principles 
laid down in two preceding works: the first, on religious 
belief; the second, on philosophic thought. 

In The Creed of a Layman I traced the growth of my own ^ 
convictions from a theologic to a scientific Faith. In The 
Philosophy of Common Sense I dealt with the intellectual 
grounds on which a human religion must be based. The 
natural complement of these treatises is to show this system 
of philosophic religion in action. Let us observe its prac- 
tical effect in moulding opinion on the great questions of 
Nations and of Society : on patriotism, international justice, 
government ; and again, on problems of Wealth, of Labour, 
of Socialism. 

Theology, absorbed in matters of Worship and hopes of 
Heaven, has no call to meddle with earthly politics, to offer 
counsel to secular rulers, or to propound any scheme for reor- 
ganising society. Its kingdom is not of this world; and it 
seldom intrudes on worldly affairs without adding to the con- 
flicts and the perplexities it finds. A human religion, on the 
other hand, is bound by its creed to preach a humane standard 
in politics, to work for a new earth, if it cannot promise a new 
heaven. It would belie its name and betray its truth if its first 



X NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

duty were not to show how the world of to-day might be made 
better, how a happier future here might be secured for our 
descendants ; how international strife should be abated, and 
class wars merged in a moral and religious socialism. 

Accordingly, at the close of a long and somewhat active 
life, — a life entirely detached from any party interest or 
personal ambition, — I collect and re-edit a few of the essays 
which I wrote on various questions, national or social. The 
lightning reviewer may perhaps call them "ancient history"; 
for they concern periods before his own memory, of which 
he seldom reads in books. But these topics are not "ancient 
history" except so far as they deal with great events, whereof 
the consequences have to be faced still, for they form the 
burning problems of statesmanship in our own generation; 

I do not hesitate to reissue studies that are thirty, even 
forty years old; for the same forces are still dominant and 
the same dilemmas are still unsolved. Vital problems con- 
cerning France, Germany, and Italy, our own problems in 
Egypt, South Africa, and India, are as much alive to-day as 
they were in the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties. The 
errors, adventures, crimes of a previous generation are more 
in evidence than ever, grow ever more perplexing and dan- 
gerous. 

The party politician who "has put his money on the 
wrong horse," the journalist on the eve of a division who has 
had to defend or to denounce a minister, may well hesitate 
in after years to print the speech he made or the article he 
wrote on the spur of the moment. 

It is a test of solid principles, whether on national or social 
questions, that they are not evanescent with every temporary 
crisis, but serve to explain the past as well as to guide the 
future. The lapse of a generation only justifies a view of 
events which had behind it principles and convictions main- 



INTRODUCTION XI 

tained throughout a long life. I have found almost nothing 
to qualify in the judgment which I passed at the time on the 
great events and the dominant personalities of the nineteenth 
century. 

The busy politician and the publicist of the hour is con- 
cerned with nothing but the question of the day; and he is 
impatient of any reminder of the controversies which took 
place when he was at school. But he cannot understand the 
present — much less can he settle its difficulties — unless he 
knows their origin and the inheritance of evils which they 
bear. The occupation of Egypt, the series of wars and of 
adventures this involved, remain still urgent questions. 
This goes to the root of the problem of Empire and its con- 
sequences. So do the long series of wars, annexations, and 
troubles in South Africa. So, too, the series of wars, annexa- 
tions, imperial difficulties in India. I am well aware of the 
vast improvement effected in the material and administrative 
condition of Egypt. I do justice to the recent efforts made to 
heal the South African imbroglio. Nor am I blind to the 
splendid services of many able and patriotic men, at home 
and abroad, to grapple with the tremendous tasks that India 
has imposed on its conquerors. 

All this is plain ; and I am the last man to forget it or to 
dispute it. But I see that the real dilemma of the Egyptian 
problem began with the occupation of 1882: — or rather 
long before, when governments became entangled in the 
financial and administrative enormities of the Egyptian 
tyrants. I trace the chaos and desolation of South Africa 
to similar follies and offences of imperialist demagogues. 
The blunders, extravagances, and crimes of our Afghan ex- 
peditions have been often repeated since, and raise the whole 
question of Imperial expansion and Imperial domination. 
Empire, alas! is not "ancient history." It is the insoluble 



Xll NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

ever-present problem of to-day in all our national affairs. 
And, as Empire is the real subject of the first Part of this 
book, so I am forced to illustrate my argument by referring 
to past events in Egypt, South Africa, and India — just as 
I begin by tracing the modern race after Empire to the 
sinister ambition of a Napoleon, a Bismarck, a Beaconsfield. 

It would be idle to consider the state of France without 
tracing it to the evils of the second Empire, to consider the 
state of modern Europe without tracing it to the malign genius 
of Bismarck, to probe the evils of our own Imperial craze 
without ascribing them to Disraeli and his pupils. A sys- 
tematic analysis of Empire is bound to start with Bismarck, 
and to trace back our present difficulties to our dealings with 
South Africa, India, and Egypt. 

These pages were all in type when the very important 
work of Lord Cromer appeared. It is a record of magnifi- 
cent success in Imperial administration and of patient states- 
manship. But it reveals to a thoughtful reader the complex 
burdens which the occupation of Egypt laid on our nation ; 
nor does it show that, in twenty-five years of prolonged effort, 
these burdens have been abated ; much less how they are to 
be closed in the future. 

The essays in this book all deal with the year 1882 — 
before the occupation of Egypt began. Why was that occupa- 
tion a necessity to England, when France withdrew from it, 
and even sacrificed her great statesman? Why was it nec- 
essary "to crush Arabi and his party"? Why was England 
to involve herself in international dilemmas to enable specu- 
lators to secure their usurious dividends? The entire ad- 
venture of bloodshed and oppression falls back always on 
"financial interests." 

I believe that these papers will prove useful as histori- 
cal documents. They are the record of revolutionary and 



INTRODUCTION Xlll 

national upheavals in the light they appeared to a contem- 
porary observer, who was also an eye-witness of tremendous 
events and in personal touch with some of the chief actors 
therein. Many politicians and most publicists are without 
any long memory of events and persons. They know little 
of what was stirring the world a generation or two ago, when 
they were at school. History they know from books. But 
of that intermediate period, a generation or two ago, they 
know little either from literature, or from memory, or from 
tradition. And yet the things which so keenly moved their 
own fathers are the problems and dilemmas which are left 
to them unsolved. 

All this remains to them a blurred and often a distorted 
sketch. I invite them now to look at a few pictures painted 
at the time — in rather warm tones and in sharp contrasts 
of light and shade, it may be, but pictures which truly por- 
trayed the alarms, the passions, the hopes, the enthusiasms 
of the hour. 

Nor do I think these papers, old as many of them are, will 
be found by any serious reader to be stale reprints. Many 
of them were pamphlets and manifestos issued by special 
societies, or circulated in quarters wholly unknown to the 
public of to-day. The essays which appeared in periodicals 
were published so long ago that the present generation never 
saw them nor heard of their existence. Practically the whole 
of this book is new matter ; and I should be surprised if the 
reader should find any part of it familiar to him. It may 
astonish him to notice opinions of mine for which he may not 
have been prepared to give me credit. 

I am neither a party politician nor a doctrinaire dogmatist. 
I profess myself bound by no man's dicta nor by any party 
watchwords. Trained in the general principles of Positivist 
sociology, I am ready to accept the opportunist aims of prac- 



XIV NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

tical statesmen, when not in open conflict with moral prin- 
ciple. I have learned much in politics from Carlyle, Francis 
Newman, Bagehot, Michelet, Mazzini, Peel, John Bright, 
John Morley, Gladstone; and in economics from Mill, 
Cobden, Spencer, Ruskin, Henry George, and William 
Morris; but I profess myself bound by no man's school. 
Nor can I accept the current labels which it is the fashion 
to assume as party badges or to bandy about as party nick- 
names. 

A Republican by conviction in the abstract, I am the 
reverse of a hidebound Democrat. With a deep loathing 
for mere militarism, I could never join any kind of Peace 
Society. Ardent patriot as I am, I repudiate the tinsel im- 
perialism of blatant demagogues. With a hatred of all 
forms of race oppression, I stand clear of the quixotic 
humanitarianism which clamours to rush into every case of 
national wrong-doing. I cannot call myself Radical, Whig, 
or Tory ; nor do I find such essential differences in the acts 
of any one of the recognised parties in the state. I have 
sometimes been called a Conservative revolutionist; but I 
must give my own interpretation to any such term before I 
could accept it. 

Nor on the social problems could I accept any one of the 
familiar labels. I am no Plutonomist, no Individualist, no 
stickler for rights of Property and personal freedom from 
state interference. If a Socialist is one who looks forward 
to a reorganisation of society in the interest of the masses — 
what Comte calls "the incorporation of the proletariat into 
the social organism" — one who fervently desires such an 
end and labours to bring it about — then I am so far a So- 
cialist. If socialism means the abolition of personal appro- 
priation of capital by force of law, then I look on such a 
dream as the era of social chaos, and moral and material ruin. 



INTRODUCTION XV 

If this seems to be a paradox, I hold it to be reconciled by 
the combination of Comte's two correlative laws. 

(i) Wealth is the product of society, and must be devoted to 

the interest of the social whole. 
(2) Moral evils can be cured only by moral, and not by 

material agencies. 

This book, then, must be taken as a whole, and as a con- 
tinuation of my previous works on religion and on philosophy. 
It is the mature and systematic belief of one who has taken 
the keenest interest in the political and social problems of 
the last fifty years, from no party or sectarian point of view, 
but with profound conviction in a general philosophy of 
society under the inspiration of a human religion. The key 
of all national and social problems lies in a human, moral, 
and scientific Creed. Their solution must justify the truth 
of that philosophy and the regenerating power of that faith. 



XVI NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 



PART I 

The book, as the title indicates, is divided into two sections, 
distinct although in mutual reaction. The first Part deals 
with international problems, war, and imperialism. It 
inevitably opens with a criticism of German militarism and 
imperialism, begun more than forty years ago by the power- 
ful statesman who, in two generations, has so deeply trans- 
formed the German people and so potently recast the politics 
of Europe. Modern imperialism and the militarising of 
nations dates from the accession of Prince Bismarck to 
power in 1862 ; and, as he was the founder, so he is to East 
and West, from Japan to the United States, the great exem- 
plar of Imperial expansion and the nation in arms. 

That is the key, the crux, the type of all the inmost prob- 
lems of our age. All serious political studies must start from 
the central movement of all — German militarism — which 
the Kaiser and his statesmen regard as a precious inheritance 
from the mighty founder of their Empire. Prince Biilow 
said in the Prussian House of Lords in a most memorable 
speech (February 26, 1908) — "the successors of Prince 
Bismarck owe it to the great Chancellor to continue the 
policy which they had inherited from him." There is the 
centre of European disturbance. 

Thirty-eight years ago I warned our people and ministers 
that the Bismarckian triumph implied an entire recasting of 
international relations, and an era of military imperialism. 
I even pointed out as an inevitable consequence of this, the 
Pan- German ambition to found a new sea-power and to dis- 
pute with us our supremacy at sea. I do not pretend to 
discuss questions of fleets and of armaments; and I join in 
no scare about our maritime defences or in promoting the 



INTRODUCTION XV11 

race to build rival Dreadnoughts. But I hold no one fit to 
argue any political problem who fails to see that the rulers 
and the people of Germany are bent on being able to meet 
Great Britain at sea on equal terms — not immediately, but 
within a decade or two of years at most. 

This is an inevitable issue for German ascendancy : from 
the point of view of German patriotism, a perfectly legitimate 
ambition. But the case of our two nations is not parallel. 
To Germany, with a small and most defensible coast but no 
colonies, a great fleet is a costly luxury, which can be used 
only for offence. To Britain, with its possessions scattered 
over the globe, its food and prosperity depending on trans- 
marine trade, a mighty fleet — even a predominant fleet — 
is a necessity of existence as a nation whilst we hold a dis- 
persed Empire. Our unwieldy Empire is bound up with 
our naval supremacy. Ruin that and you ruin their Empire 
is the deep conviction of German patriotism: and a very 
natural ambition it is. 

It is not enough to be assured that the British fleet is equal 
to that of three Powers, and overmatches that of Germany 
three or four times over. To-day that is true. But ten or 
twenty years hence things will be changed indeed. The 
whole German fleet is, or may be, concentrated in one of the 
most defensible positions in Europe — the mouth of the 
Elbe and the south coast of the Baltic — if not the mouths 
of the Rhine and the Scheldt. One-half — possibly two- 
thirds — of the British fleet must be elsewhere in East or 
West when there is prospect of a great war. Who can 
guarantee that, in the year 1920, a German fleet, concen- 
trated in the Baltic and the German Ocean, and possibly 
with an ally, may not be able to overpower that portion of 
the British fleet which can be safely withdrawn from guard- 
ing the Empire and protecting our supplies of food ? 



XV111 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

To work for that grand achievement in the future is the 
inheritance of Bismarck to modern Germany — to modern 
Europe. Bismarckian imperialism, which his successors 
acknowledge as a duty, implies the attempt. Not to-day — 
not to-morrow — not perhaps alone — and certainly not 
whilst Germany is isolated — isolated as a result of Bis- 
marckism — and whilst Britain is rich in alliances and 
ententes. But alliances come and go like sunshine and 
storm-clouds. And our children may live to see black tem- 
pests gathering up in East and West, and the scattered Em- 
pire threatened within and without from many sides at once. 
Then will be the hour to challenge the naval supremacy of 
Britain. 

For these reasons, the key of international problems lies 
in the organisation, the power, the ambition of German 
imperialism. And a serious study of European complica- 
tions must start from that which I treat in the first essay — 
the Bismarckism which is what it was more than forty years 
ago — the menace and the trouble of European peace and 
progress : — a far greater menace to the very existence of 
our country than it was when Whig statesmen with tran- 
quillity saw France overwhelmed in 1870. 

It is idle to repeat to us that neither Germany nor any 
European Power has the least idea of attacking our country 
— now, or within the next five, it may be the next ten, 
years. Nor could Germany or any other Power dream of 
success, if they did. But politics are not a matter of to-day, 
nor of to-morrow — but of hereafter. When Kaiser W T ilhelm 
started his naval programme on January 1, 1900, he said : — 
11 1 shall reorganise my navy, so that it shall stand on the same 
level as my army, and with its help the German Empire shall 
attain to a place which it has not yet reached" When those 
words were spoken the German army was acknowledged 



INTRODUCTION XIX 

to hold a supremacy in Europe. When the Kaiser's very 
natural, wholly patriotic, ambition is realised, and his navy 
has the same level of predominance as his army, the very 
existence of the British Empire will await his signal to break 
it up, and the independence of Britain will hang on the re- 
sources of our home defence. 

Need I say that no man has a deeper admiration for the 
intellectual eminence of the German people, their great quali- 
ties, and their splendid achievements in science, in art, in 
literature, in municipal government — I will even add in mili- 
tary organisation and training ? I know Germany from end 
to end. I have lived in Germany for long spells at different 
periods. I have watched her wonderful growth in many 
visits, from 185 1 to the present time. I have German friends, 
and have the heartiest sympathy with all that is noble, intel- 
lectual, sociable in the German heart and the homes of the 
Fatherland. By education, by sympathy, by personal tastes, 
I am a strong pro-German still. But I cannot shut my eyes 
to the inner meaning of the Imperial autocracy. 

With the efforts of the day to secure an entente between 
our countries I can heartily join. By all means let us en- 
courage good feeling between the two great types of the 
Teutonic race. Blood is thicker than water; and every 
Teuton feels the kinship in spite of political differences or 
rivalries. But the exuberant good-fellowship of journalists 
and savants is a passing mood — an artificial, shallow, and 
on one side a purely official movement. It has nothing to 
do with serious politics, with international policy, with the 
future of Britain or of Europe. Let us all cheer the genial 
and ubiquitous Kaiser. Let us embrace the savant, the 
artist, the poet of the Fatherland. But let us keep our 
powder dry — and study the birth, the growth, and the future 
of Bismarckism. 



XX NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Do I by this encourage any imitation of militarism ; am I 
justifying imperialism for ourselves; am I playing into the 
hands of the Union Jack enthusiasts ? Humanity forbid ! 
My whole purpose is to point out the dangers, the evils, the 
tremendous responsibilities with which the Empire burdens 
our people and our generation. This monstrous, abnormal, 
polyglot, incoherent Empire is our white man's burden — 
our statesmen's dilemma, our cancer, and our curse. In the 
last essay of the first Part I explain what this means ; and I 
show the grounds of political foresight, of moral principle, 
of religious feeling, wherein this conviction is based. 

My memory, which goes back over the whole reign of the 
late Queen, forces on my mind the momentous change which 
during that period came over our country. From the time 
of Waterloo, and for a generation after it, England was fore- 
most amongst the great Powers of Europe. At the opening 
of the twentieth century England was swallowed up in Em- 
pire. From being the dominant nation in the state-system 
of Europe, it was translated into a nondescript world-power. 
From a solid impregnable island, it had become an aggre- 
gate of unstable and disparate fragments. England-plus- 
her-colonies had ceased as a homogeneous state. We are 
now an Asiatic, African, American, Australasian hybrid. 
As an Englishman, I view with shame the effacement of Old 
England. As a patriot, I foresee the calamities in which its 
inevitable dissolution may involve us. As a reformer, I 
deplore the wasted opportunities, the protracted misrule, the 
social chaos it inflicts. 

I am no "little Englander." I am an Englishman of the 
English, with British, Welsh, and Irish ancestors. And, 
for one, I am intensely proud of England with its thousand 
years of glorious traditions, down from the incomparable 
Alfred — the England which they now have smothered in 



INTRODUCTION XXI 

cosmopolitan dependencies. I belong to a political school 
intensely patriotic, for on the walls of Newton Hall we in- 
scribed as a sacred watchword the name of "Country." To 
those who taunt us with "the craven fear of being great," we 
retort with the finger of scorn at the low-bred pride of being 
big. 

It is not merely the sinking of heart I feel when I find our 
ancient England besmirched into a mongrel Empire, when 
I listen to the blasphemous swagger of the imperialism of 
the canteen, when I think of all the waste in wealth, force, 
good men, engulfed in precarious adventures over the globe : 
— it is not merely a matter of degraded feeling and demoral- 
ised policy that stirs me. It is the bitter conviction that this 
parvenu Empire is doomed to early dissolution — is incapable 
of being made permanent or stable — and in the meantime 
is turning our political progress backwards, and may pos- 
sibly lead us down into cruel ruin. 

Nothing can ever make a nation out of a congeries of prov- 
inces, with every skin, creed, and type of man to be found on 
earth. And nothing can ever make the red patches tossed 
over the map of the planet a coherent state or even a colossal 
Empire. It is not a colossal Empire, but a patchwork bundle 
of conquests — not even strung together with a common civil 
and military system, but detached and as far apart as North 
Pole from South Pole, as Central Africa from the Pacific. 

Common sense tells us that units so heterogeneous and 
isolated can be held only by a nation which is "mistress of 
the seas" — i.e. by a people whose navy can overpower two 
or three navies combined. For the moment that is the case. 
We have hitherto had but two possible rivals. We are now 
about to have two, if not three, more. Is the British navy 
for all time prepared to meet at once five or six nations at 
sea? I trow not. 



XX11 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

It is true that at present there is no danger of any such 
combination, nor of any combination that Britain need fear. 
But who can predict the possible combinations of the next 
twenty years — even of ten years ? Now, it is the inevitable 
effect of warlike supremacy by any one power to provoke an 
irrepressible rivalry to challenge it. Modern civilisation will 
not tolerate the hegemony of any one Power. All the jeal- 
ousies, all the alarms, all the evils bred by the modern hege- 
mony of the new Bismarckian Empire are being slowly but 
inevitably nursed against the maritime hegemony of Britain. 
It is childish to brag about overcoming this rivalry by sheer 
force ; as if we could go on launching fifty Dreadnoughts, 
and could indefinitely maintain a "three-power standard," 
when the day comes that Germany and the United States, 
if not the yellow races, and the Muscovite races, have each 
developed a sea-power equal to our own to-day. 

It is quite true — and I have just argued this very point — 
that supremacy at sea is necessary to our actual safety in 
our own shores at home, because with a home army of but 
100,000 regulars at most, we could not sleep in peace within 
a few hours of the Continental millions were it not for our 
invincible fleet. But that is no answer to our rivals. They 
say, "We have each of us to protect our own countries, and 
you might protect yours if you did not aim at being the pre- 
dominant world-power. And we will tolerate no longer any 
predominant world-power." 

The entire balance of power — the whole European state 
system — has been entirely revolutionised during the reign 
of the late Queen. It is a material, intellectual, and moral 
change that has come over our kingdom. The home in- 
terests of England, Scotland, and Ireland have become 
secondary. Cosmopolitan adventures, interests, ideals, have 
become primary. Napoleon III., Bismarck, Disraeli, 



INTRODUCTION XX111 

founded empires — of which one is extinct and the others 
are less than forty years old. Of all empires on earth, or 
even recorded in history, the British Empire, the youngest 
of all, is the most disjointed, incoherent, and disparate ever 
devised by man. All races, every skin, religion, manners, 
language, climate, ideal, people it, — Negroes, Hottentots, 
Kaffirs, Arabs, Malays, Chinese, Hindoos, Greeks, Italians, 
Spaniards, Dutch, French, — with their own languages, 
history, and law. The Court of Appeal administers thirty- 
two different legal systems or codes. All religions exist in it 
from Ultramontane Catholicism to the worst Negro-Fetichism 
— if not Devil-worship and cannibalism, or human sacrifices. 
All languages are spoken, from the tongue of Shakespeare to 
the gibbering of Bushmen. 

Is citizenship possible in such a horde? Is patriotism 
conceivable? Is settled government practicable? Can a 
crowd of scattered conquests be welded into a permanent 
state ? Are these three hundred and fifty millions our fellow- 
citizens? Can a restless and divided democracy look to 
hold them down together for ever as mere alien tributaries? 
This kingdom has a history of one thousand years — the 
conquered dependencies hardly more than a century. On 
how many years more can we venture to count ? — now 
that dominion has been substituted for citizenship — now 
that in place of a loyal union of free citizens we have a string 
of huge provinces held to tribute by armies shipped out and 
back in relays? 

And the ballads they bawl out in the canteen tell us how 
" big" it is ! Is a man who weighs twenty-four stone a better 
man in private life than one of twelve? Is Russia, which 
reaches in a straight line for some 5000 miles, a match for 
an island of 500 miles ? Is a man whose income is five mill- 
ions a year as happy as one who lives on five thousand ? Of 



XXIV NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

all the coarse crazes of this age of "bounders," the pride in 
a "big" Empire is the worst invention of our cheap-jack 
literature. When Xerxes led his millions to Salamis, when 
Philip II. blessed his Armada, when Napoleon set forth to 
Moscow, their empires looked mighty till they ended in 
ignominy and ruin. 

It is an inheritance of evil omen — a damnosa hereditas — 
incapable of being permanently held or yet of being suddenly 
quitted — rather a tremendous task to be gradually, fear- 
lessly, wisely faced and reduced in time. To go on blindly 
increasing it, or maintaining it unchanged and unreformed, 
is the road to national ruin. Too long has Empire torn 
away our thoughts from all the evils and sufferings we have 
at home, from sympathy with all that is best and most pro- 
gressive in our European neighbours, from ideals of a civili- 
sation of peace and reform. It has plunged us into many a 
miserable war, and burdened us with a load of cruel and 
needless debt. Imperial pride is a sordid exchange for 
national patriotism. The imperial ideal is the vulgarising 
of our social life, the stifling of our national development, 
and the distortion of our political energy. Whilst we are 
pretending to Christianise the barbarous East and the South, 
we are leaving moral and social barbarism to breed at home. 
To add ever new provinces to the red map of Empire is to pile 
fresh burdens and dangers on these islands of our forefathers. 
To find careers for a hundred thousand well-born youths is 
to close our ears to the just demands of the forty millions 
we neglect. 



INTRODUCTION XXV 



PART II 



Just as the tremendous responsibilities of our amorphous 
Empire are the crux of our National Problems, so the up- ^ 
heaval of the Industrial order is the most urgent of our Social 
Problems. It is a question wherein, for some forty years, 
I have had a keen interest and have taken some slight part. 
For sixty years at least the claims of Labour to have a larger 
share in the control of the state and in the proceeds of their 
toil have been continually shaking the world of politics and 
also of economics. And now both worlds are confronted 
with the far-reaching, indeterminate, elusive social revolution 
known as socialism. 

With the deep and ever-growing uprising of all civilised 
workmen — and indeed of all men of clear thought and 
generous feeling — against the injustice and the abomina- 
tions rife in our industrial system, I have been through life 
in complete sympathy. And in the attacks upon our vicious 
economic world I find little to dispute — be these in the criti- 
cal side of books by Henry George, Karl Marx, the Fabians, 
or the Social Democrats. I wholly and ardently agree with 
them that this earth will not be a home worthy of civilised 
man until there has been a root-and-branch social revolution 
to reform the daily lot of the vast working majority of our 
fellow-citizens. 

But when we pass to their reconstructive schemes I can see j 
little but sophisms and passionate dogmatism in the random 
crudities which pass as socialism. These vague Utopias 
swallow up each other; and if applied in practice would 
swallow up society and civilisation together. 

There are eight main grounds whereon the shifting phan- 
tasmagoria called socialism would be disastrous and futile ; — 



XXVI NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

(i) Social regeneration could only be sound and lasting if it 
took account of all the sides of man's social life — in- 
tellectual, moral, domestic, artistic, and religious. 

(2) A panacea of society which took account of nothing but 

Labour could be nothing but a sordid kind of materi- 
alism. 

(3) Modern Industry could not be maintained — much less 

developed — without rare individual genius and no 
less rare personal energy. 

(4) Such special genius and rare energy can only be secured 

by personal freedom and the untrammelled initiative 
of gifted individuals. 

(5) To suppose that industrial genius and personal energy 

can be hired by the mass of the manual labourers is 
an ignorant delusion. 

(6) Democratic government is at best a poor makeshift for 

ruling the state ; to apply it to Industry could end in 
nothing but material ruin. 

(7) The personal control of capital is not only the very con- 

dition indispensable to Literature, Art, to all Improve- 
ment, physical, moral, and aesthetic, but it is also the 
essential field of some of man's noblest and most 
generous qualities. 

(8) To subject industrial life as a whole to the democratic 

rule of the manual workers would be a tyranny which 
would crush improvement, art, thought, and freedom, 
and would speedily bring this island first to collapse, 
then to starvation, and ultimately to subjection to a 
foreign conqueror. 

(1) In the essay on The Limits of Political Economy I 
sought to expose the essential narrowness of the orthodox 
Plutonomy in fashion in the fifties and the sixties by show- 



INTRODUCTION XXV11 

ing that the pretended science was usually hypothetical 
reasoning from quite narrow data. I believe the essay to 
be one of the earliest systematic attempts to shake the mis- 
chievous fallacies of the orthodox economists. The "dis- 
mal science" has now lost its vogue; but I reissue my criti- 
cism of its hollow dogmatism because most of the argument 
applies mutatis mutandis to the current fallacies of socialism. 
The "orthodox" economists of a former generation con- 
structed a spurious code of industrial axioms on the cynical 
assumption that all men acted on the instigation of their 
material interests. 

The socialism of to-day, however much its advocates differ 
in method, starts with a similar false assumption, viz. that 
all the men should be forced to live in the ways their neigh- 
bours shall direct as most useful to the convenience of the 
masses. This cognate fallacy has no immoral basis, it is 
true. It even exaggerates an eminently social desire. But, 
as it rests on the crude doctrine of material democracy, and 
neglects all the nobler sides of social life, it would result in 
paralysing society and in the end bring about an industrial 
chaos. 

In the first essay of Part II. I have analysed the human 
motives and ideals of life which Plutonomy neglected as use- 
less and inoperative in social life. Almost every word of 
that argument may be applied to most of the current types 
of socialism which have nothing to say or to teach about all 
the nobler and purer forms of human energy, which destine 
society to the mechanical task of working up raw materials, 
and satisfying the common bodily wants of mankind. Loose 
generalities which some Socialists fling, as crumbs from the 
laden tables of Labour, to Art, Philosophy, Religion, moral 
and scientific Education — to all that makes up complex 
civilisation — these empty phrases count for nothing in their 



XXV1U NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Utopias. A true and sincere socialism must reorganise 
Society from top to bottom in all the manifold and subtle 
phases of man's social life, as ever was seen in the varied 
Past or as ever is imagined in the Time to come. 

(2) That miners, spinners, and masons should be fasci- 
nated by such childish sophisms as that "all wealth is pro- 
duced by the manual workers"; "that the entire product 
of Labour should be handed over day by day to the labour- 
ers"; "that wealth is criminal in itself" — that such non- 
sense should be listened to eagerly by men bowed down by 
the cruel conditions of modern toil, is not so strange. But 
that men who pretend to speak with culture of mind and 
authority to teach should preach such wild stuff is a sign of 
the mental chaos of our age in the break-up of all systematic 
convictions. 

The whole of the second Part, and especially the essays on 
Co-operation, on Social Remedies, and the last, on Moral 
and Religious Socialism, discuss these fallacies. Manual 
Labour, left to itself, could produce nothing; and, but for 
scientific leading and the resources of Capital, would only 
waste its labour and destroy good material. If the whole 
product of Labour were paid out to the labourers there 
would be no accumulation, no capital to start fresh work, and 
soon no means of working at all. "Wealth" is no more a 
crime than Labour ; for human society can only exist by the 
co-operation of both. 

(3) The crudest of the fallacies which mislead unfortu- 
nate toilers for wage is the dream that great industries could 
be managed by popular elections, committees, and officials 
chosen by the votes of the mass. A great factory, a railway, 
a bank, could no more be run in such ways than Raphael's 
Transfiguration could be produced by a gang of house- 
painters, or Hamlet have been composed by the printers of 



INTRODUCTION XXIX 

The Times. All industry rests on individual concentration, 
personal genius, stores of accumulation, and then on mas- 
terly rapidity in action. Napoleon's victories "were won by 
half-an-hour." Industrial victories — even industrial suc- 
cess — are likewise the prize of rapidity, secrecy, inspira- 
tion, command of large reserved capital — and above all of 
freedom. Battles are not won by councils of war — much 
less by the shouts of whole battalions of Tommy Atkinses. 

All this has been elaborately worked out in the essays of 
Part II. on Co-operation and Social Remedies, and need not 
be discussed any further. I merely now state my conviction 
that the Marxian scheme of economic revolution, rigidly 
enforced in Europe, could result in nothing but such desola- 
tion as fell on it when the Roman Empire was broken up by 
the Northern tribes. And, if enforced in our own country, 
would end in a few months in general starvation, owing to 
the stoppage of our foreign food-supplies, through the de- 
struction of credit, of mercantile skill, and of efficient manage- 
ment of the material necessities of life. 

(4)- (8) The other inevitable results of real socialism are 
discussed in the second Part of this book ; and in the essays 
on Social Remedies, in particular, some evidence is given of 
the incalculable services to society which large capitals con- 
tinually afford, but which could not be replaced by any ad- 
ministrative or democratic machinery. If Democracy ever 
did get into its hands the collective Capital of the community, 
it would soon prove itself to be the most close-fisted, cruel, 
and grasping Capitalist of all. 

This book does not undertake to expound in detail the 
social reorganisation which it would substitute for the exist- 
ing economic tyranny. This is sketched in the leading ideas 
to be found in the concluding essay on Moral and Religious 
Socialism. It is, in fact, the subject of the whole of the 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

volumes of which this book is the continuation, as it is indeed 
the real subject of almost everything I have written since I 
accepted the social and religious scheme of regeneration that 
the nineteenth century owed to Auguste Comte. We also 
are Socialists — but Socialists with a difference — that 
whilst working for an entire reorganisation of industrial life, 
we will not cease to work for the far more vital reorganisa- 
tion of moral, intellectual, religious life. Without this, the 
pretended reorganisation of industrial life, by the violent 
confiscation of personal capital (for " compensation" is an 
idle and mendacious phrase) — this is a suicidal, and most 
immoral, delusion. 

There will be found here no attempt to discuss, what are 
so often mistaken for real socialism, the current schemes for 
the state acquisition of railways, of mines, of ports and 
docks, of large tracts of land, or of banks ; for the State con- 
trol of all academies and schools; for the feeding of school 
pupils ; for old-age pensions ; for the support of the poor and 
helpless; for an Eight-hour Day — or a Seven-hour Day; 
for a minimum wage; for a revision of the Suffrage; for a 
reduction of armaments; or for the reorganisation of local 
government; and generally of the whole parliamentary and 
Imperial system. 

It is a mistake to call these schemes socialism. Many of 
them are now begun or advocated by reformers of all schools. 
The present writer would be heartily in favour of gradually 
introducing any or all of them with due consideration of the 
practical advantage of each scheme in its detailed form. Each 
proposal has to be considered by practical statesmen on its 
merits and on its proven efficiency. It would be a mischiev- 
ous dogmatism to resist them as mere socialism; as it is a 
fallacy to regard them as real and effective socialism. The 
socialism which was brought over here from France and Ger- 



INTRODUCTION XXXI 

many, which was propounded by Proudhon, Lassalle, and 
Marx, is a very different thing. It is a form of Communism, 
essentially based on the annihilation of personal ownership 
of Capital in any form — the annihilation in the early future 
of the Family, and ultimately of Civilisation — because it 
applies a rigid and dominant democracy to material life alone, 
blind to all life, domestic, moral, intellectual, and religious. 

To that we oppose a socialism, economic, moral, and 
religious, whereby the reorganisation of society as a whole 
will be secured by a new ethical and religious education, 
entirely reforming the spirit in which Capital, the product of 
society, shall be used, enjoyed, and controlled for the good of 
society alone. 



PART I 
NATIONAL PROBLEMS 



BISMARCKISM: THE POLICY OF BLOOD AND 

IRON 

{November 15, 1870) 

The following Essay was written during the great Franco- 
German War in the middle of November 1870, after 
the surrender of Metz and the armies of Napoleon III, 
and of Bazaine. Trochu, with 400,000 men in arms, 
was still holding out in Paris, and the Republican Govern- 
ment was still at Tours with several armies in the field. 
At that time English sympathy, at least in the Army, 
in the Conservative press, and in the working classes, 
was being turned in favour of the French defence. The 
writer, who had been strongly opposed to Napoleon's 
mad invasion of German territory, was full of indignation 
at the mode in which the war was being carried on by 
Bismarck. He had been on the Continent and through 
Germany during August, September, and October. And 
he foresaw the consequences to England and to Europe 
of submitting to Prussia becoming the dominant power on 
the Continent. The Essay must be read as the passionate 
protest of one who was then labouring to rouse English 
opinion to give some assistance to France. It is reprinted 
without modification as it stood in the Fortnightly 
Review, December 1870, vol. viii., then conducted by 
Mr. John Morley. The writer reproduces it because it 
is as true in essential principle as it was at the time, 

3 



3) 



NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

because the evils then evident, and the consequences then 
foreseen, are again in some degree imminent to-day. The 
writer never was a doctrinaire "pacificist," as it is the 
fashion to call those who deprecate the huge war prepa- 
rations of our age. But he has ever been a convinced 
opponent of Militarism. With all his admiration for 
the genius and energy of the German people, he still 
believes that the real cause of the unrest of Europe is 
to be found in the system of ascendancy by armaments, 
founded by Bismarck and continued by his successors 
(1908). 



11 It is desirable and necessary to improve the social and politi- 
cal condition of Germany; this, however, cannot be 
brought about by resolutions and votes of majorities, or 
speeches of individuals, but 'by blood and iron.'" — 
Count Bismarck. 

Tremendous as is the drama which we have been watch- 
ing breathless in Europe, we have seen as yet but its opening 
scenes. The crash of the most gigantic battles known to 
history has deafened our senses to the political movement. 
We have been brought, as it were, in the flesh, close to these 
onslaughts of two nations. We have almost heard with 
our ears the cries of triumph and despair. We have almost 
seen with our eyes the grappling of the combatants. We hold 
our breath in the crisis, feeling passionately, some with one, 
some with the other, fighter — as if we were watching gladi- 
ators in an arena. 

It would be well to look at it more as politicians, and less 
as spectators. This great struggle concerns the welfare of 
Europe and of England; it is our own future and peace 
that are at stake. Let us consider what may be the con- 



BISMARCKISM 5 

sequences to civilisation, and not regard it merely as a grand 
study of national character or some stupendous experiment 
in modern science. It is, after all, not entirely a matter of 
sympathy with this or that type of race. Nor does it turu 
altogether on this or that quality or institution in one people or 
the other. Our mere sympathies have their place; but it 
is high time to face the political issues foreshadowed. And 
whilst the crowd of the amphitheatre, ever siding with force 
and success, turn down their thumbs, and cry "Habet! 
Habet!" let us ask, What may this contest be preparing 
for Europe? 

It is pitiful to hear the grounds on which the issues at 
stake are so often decided. An anecdote about a land- 
wehrman, or the tone of a proclamation, seems to some 
people sufficient to determine the right and wrong in the 
greatest of modern struggles. Frenchmen have given utter- 
ance to much unwarrantable language about the "sacred- 
ness of French soil," "Paris the city of the world"; the 
peculiar and special sanctity of a republic, and the enormity 
of assaulting the Capital. Count Bismarck never said a 
truer word than this, that the honour of France is of precisely 
the same quality as the honour of other nations. To besiege 
Paris is what it would be to besiege Berlin, if it were fortified. 
To bombard Paris is no greater outrage than it would be to 
bombard London. The laws of war certainly do give the 
right to shell a fortified city. And the annexation of two 
provinces is not to be counted as a crime merely since it is 
done at the expense of a republic. 

Nor is the nonsense wanting on the other side. The 
familiar picture of the German soldier, with the inevitable 
three children at home, writing letters to his wife between 
the pauses of each battle, and studying his pocket copy of 
the Vedas on the outposts, is striking; but it is not decisive 



6 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

on a question of boundaries. Pious ejaculations to extir- 
pate the immorality of France sound strangely from men 
reeking from the gambling hells of Baden and Homburg, 
and the stews of Hamburg, Berlin, and Vienna. The fact 
that the educated classes are serving in the German ranks 
is not incompatible with the opinion that the nation is dis- 
ordered with military ambition. The German troops may 
be learned in every modern and ancient tongue. Does that 
lessen the danger of a vast military empire? The German 
armies may be the "nation in arms." But have invaders 
in any age — did Tilly or Attila himself — strip a people 
more utterly to the bone than they have stripped the east of 
France? These fathers of families and model husbands 
can burn down villages on system, set fire to farmhouses 
with petroleum, massacre civilians in cold blood by superior 
order, and use substantial citizens as buffers on their railway 
trains. 

There is so much of the overgrown schoolboy in the English 
world, that great political movements are judged by the 
childish rules of the playground. People need to be reminded 
that there is something in politics more profound than the 
motto of a "fair field and no favour." "They would fight, 
and they must fight it out," says one. " The weaker is beaten, 
and must pay the stakes," says another. "France began it," 
says one. "Germany drove her to it," says another. "The 
French are a nation of liars," cries one. "The Germans 
are such brutes," replies his neighbour. All this is the 
schoolboy view of the war, just as thousands of people took 
the side of slavery in the American civil war, because they 
said the Yankees bragged and the Southerners were descended 
from gentlemen. 

Now what we want is a political view of this war. A 
question like this is not a law-suit, nor is it a personal quarrel. 



BISMARCKISM 7 

It concerns the future well-being of Europe. Speculations 
into the real origin of the war are worse than useless. They 
are like discussions on the origin of evil. At the same time 
some short account of the basis, as it were, on which the 
present argument rests, may be almost indispensable. 

It is quite plain that for generations, throughout the 
political and literary classes of France, loud and arrogant 
voices had been continually raised for the frontier of the 
Rhine. There is no proof whatever that these disgraceful 
appeals could ever have moved the body of the French nation 
to an aggressive war for its possession. But the aggrandise- 
ment of Germany, and the formation of a vast military power 
by her side, undoubtedly filled France with a fever of jealousy 
and fear. The jealousy of German unity was both insolent 
and foolish, and deeply disgraces the French name. The 
fear of the German military organisation, if hardly worthy 
of a great nation, was not unnatural ; and if we look at the 
professional cravings of the German chiefs, quite excusable. 
There happened to France what would happen to England 
if France by a war of aggrandisement had seized Belgium 
and Holland, had doubled her naval strength, possessed 
a chain of great arsenals along the northern coasts, and had 
acquired a fleet of ironclads in the Channel far superior to 
that of England, with the avowed purpose of disputing her 
maritime supremacy. There can be no doubt that England 
would have seized the first opportunity of bringing the struggle 
to an issue ; and every second Englishman would have been 
saying, " Better to fight it out at once." This is precisely 
what France felt towards Germany. 

But although the professional classes in both nations were 
equally prepared for war, in both they were kept in restraint 
by the good sense of the peaceable mass of the people. And 
there is not the smallest reason to suppose that either the 



8 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

French or the German people would deliberately have chosen 
a war of conquest. It is this which makes the war peculiarly 
the crime of Napoleon and his civil and military abettors. 
Large classes of French society wantonly supported him, and 
before the opinion of France could make itself heard, she 
was hurled into war. The French people as a whole had 
no voice or part in the matter. And all the efforts of the 
prefets could not wring a show of assent. It is utterly untrue 
that either they or the citizens of Paris advocated war. The 
writer saw a letter written by a very able observer from 
Paris (one who is now at his place on the ramparts) during 
those days when Pietri's hirelings were shouting through 
the streets, "a Berlin!" "Paris," wrote he, "est morne 
et silencieux." And even the Government never pretended 
to make, and never dreamed of making, this a war for the 
Rhine frontier. A victory, the shadow of a success, and a 
plausible ground for peace, was all that they dreamt of. 
An atrocious project in itself; one in which the French 
people suffered itself to be involved, and one for which the 
French people have paid a terrible price. 

In this state of things the war began, and no one desired 
more earnestly than the present writer that the Germans 
might repel the iniquitous invasion, and destroy the military 
power and prestige of the Empire. No one rejoiced more 
than he did over the crushing completeness with which this 
was done. The gain to civilisation in the extinction of 
Napoleonism, and of the wretched impostor in whom it 
has ended for ever, in the disgrace which has covered the 
corrupt army he had created, is almost a sufficient com- 
pensation to France and to Europe for all the sufferings of 
this war. It is therefore with no blind partiality for France 
that this question is here discussed. 

But the matter for us is this — What does all this portend 



BISMARCKISM 9 

to Europe ? It is of little use to weigh out the relative measure 
of guilt in either Government, or the degree in which their 
people participated in it. The German leaders have passed 
from the task of defence into a career of conquest. They 
have now thrown off the mask, and no longer contend that 
they are continuing the national defence. They no longer 
even pretend that they are fighting for territory. They are 
fighting now (November 15) solely for the military point of 
honour — the taking of Paris. As the Times correspondent 
at Versailles told us, the King would grant no armistice; 
for every Prussian soldier had but one fixed idea — to enter 
Paris. That is to say, the Germans are now fighting for 
military glory. It is for this they are desolating France and 
distracting Europe. 

We have protested so fiercely against the military ambition 
of France, that we have come to forget there is such a thing 
as military ambition outside France at all. But what is 
Prussia? The Prussian monarchy is the creation of war. 
Its history, its traditions, its ideal, are simply those of war. 
It is the sole European kingdom which has been built up, 
province by province, on the battlefield, cemented stone by 
stone in blood. Its kings have been soldiers: sometimes 
generals, sometimes, as now, drill-sergeants ; but ever soldiers. 
The whole state organisation from top to bottom is military. 
Its people are a drilled nation of soldiers on furlough : its 
sovereign is simply commander-in-chief; its aristocracy are 
simply officers of the staff; its capital is a camp. 

Nowhere in Europe — not even in Russia — has the 
military tradition and ideal been sustained in so unbroken 
a chain. Prussia proper has been the only European state 
organised on a military basis as completely as any state of 
antiquity. In the words of the Edinburgh Review, "No 
nation since the Roman has ever devoted itself so wholly 



10 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

to the development of the military side of the national life." 
And this is true. Let it be distinctly understood that this 
is said of Prussia only in its political, or rather its inter- 
national aspect. The writer is the last person to forget the 
splendid intellectual, artistic, and moral achievements of 
Germany ; the high culture, and noble qualities of individual 
Germans; their industry, energy, and devotion to education. 
All that is not here in question. What is meant is that in 
her international relations Prussia is a nation resting on a 
military basis. Prussia in a distorted way is the Rome of 
modern Europe — a brave and energetic race giving their 
whole national force to war, and steadily conquering their 
neighbours step by step. The notion of the Prussian army 
being simply a militia of citizens fighting for self-defence 
is an idle figment. Let one test suffice. Prussia, or rather 
Prussianised Germany, has suddenly thrown into the field 
at least 800,000 men, possibly 1,000,000. 

Grant that these are mostly armed citizens. If there is 
one thing in this war certain, it is that this vast host, the largest 
which has ever been gathered under one head in Europe, 
has been led by highly-trained professional officers, equipped 
with an adequate commissariat, provided with gigantic 
siege and train appliances, aided with the most scientific 
engineers, and directed by the most accomplished staff that 
has ever taken part in war. Now what does this imply? 
It is this — that highly-trained leaders for 800,000 men in 
every branch of the scientific uses of war are not the creation 
of a militia, are not made in a day, but in themselves prove 
a devotion of the national power to war as a profession far 
greater than exists in any people in the world — far greater 
than ever has been regularly organised since the palmy days 
of the Roman Republic. 

We hear much of the Chauvinism of the French army 



BISMARCKISM 1 1 

and military class. No language can be too strong for it. 
It is odious ; and France, even in passing through the fire, 
is well freed from the curse of France — its own army. But 
that Chauvinism — the mere insolence of the soldier — 
which is the curse and shame of France, has not tainted the 
mass of the people. The French peasant, and still more, 
the French workman — that is to say, nineteen out of twenty 
Frenchmen — look on the soldier's professional arrogance 
with loathing. To the peasant the army represents the 
blood-tax, to the workman the instrument of the tyrant. 
And thus Chauvinism in France, with all its shameful attri- 
butes, is a cancer in French society, but is not its bone and 
sinew. 

We never hear of the Chauvinism of Prussia. What 
may be the reason? Perhaps that the whole nation is so 
penetrated with a faith in military qualities — Chauvinism, 
in fact — that it finds no distinct type. In Prussia the 
professional soldier makes less noise — not because the 
professional soldier is so alien to the rest of society, but 
because he is so much akin to it. Every Prussian, in one 
sense, is a professional soldier; and as a matter of course 
adopts the soldier's creed, ideal, and morality. No one can 
doubt that the German is a brave, strong, self-reliant, acute, 
and calm man. It is in all the individual virtues a grand 
and large type of human nature. The German soldier is 
conspicuously, and even nobly, free from gasconading. 
He very, very rarely brags. A fine quality; but there are 
others necessary to a social being. And a man may disdain 
to boast, be brave and self-possessed, and yet be overween- 
ingly proud of his brute force, and determined to exert his 
force without — from the social point of view — mercy, 
shame, or conscience. And such a man is the professional 
Prussian soldier. 



12 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

What, for the last generation, has been the history of the 
monarchy of Frederick in its international relations? Two 
wars of conquest against Denmark; a war of conquest 
against Southern Germany; bullying Switzerland; bully- 
ing Holland ; oppression in Schleswig ; oppression in Posen ; 
oppression in Hanover, Saxony, Frankfort, Hamburg. 
We quite forget that that history of the destruction of the 
old German Confederation is a perfect tissue of violence 
and fraud. Spoliation more arrogant, and chicanery more 
shameless, has never been seen in Europe in modern times. 
The Prussian deals with the weak in Europe, as Russia deals 
with the Turk, as Europeans deal with Asiatics, but as no 
other people in Europe deal with a Christian neighbour. 
In Prussian politics alone the very germ of international 
morality is wanting. 

Unhappily this gospel of the sword has sunk deeper into 
the entire Prussian people than any other in Europe. The 
social system being that of an army, and each citizen drilled 
man by man, there is (out of the working class) no sign of 
national conscience in this matter. And the servile temper 
begotten by this eternal drill inclines a whole nation to repeat, 
as by word of command, and perhaps to believe, the con- 
venient sophisms which the chiefs of its staff put into their 
mouths. I purposely here and elsewhere speak of Prussia, 
and not of Germany ; for it is Prussia alone which is regularly 
organised on a military basis. 

We hear much of the Napoleonic legend. But there is 
such a thing as the Hohenzollern legend; and one of the 
sophisms which Germany repeats is the worship, as of a great 
modern ruler, of a king who, even in his own eyes, is a sort 
of imitation Czar. One of the most laughable of these 
sophisms is the notion that the German is a mild, peaceable, 
and stay-at-home creature, utterly inoffensive, and never 



BISMARCKISM 1 3 

resorting to arms except in urgent self-defence. Really 
the "mild German" reminds one of the "mild Hindoo." 
It is entirely forgotten that individual is a very different 
thing from national character. And the quiet or jovial 
Hans of his own fireside, under a complex set of national 
institutions, becomes, as the unit of a nation, one of a con- 
quering people. Nothing can get over these facts: that 
the history of Prussia consists of military annals; that the 
present generation of Prussians have three times threatened, 
and have four times engaged in, a foreign war; and that 
scarcely an acre of the broad fields of Germany but has 
been soaked in the blood of one or other variety of the "mild 
German." The lanzknecht is transformed ; but he stalks 
still beneath the pickelhaube. 

Prussia, and even Germany under the Prussian drill, is, 
in truth, a nation far more military than France. French 
opinion, had it had time to speak, would have held back 
Napoleon from his iniquitous career. But the Prussian rank 
and file (such a thing as public opinion does not exist) have 
neither the desire nor the power, as we saw in '66, to question 
the commands of their chiefs. And one of the most ludicrous 
examples of this slavish condition of things is seen in the way 
in which the entire German race re-echoes the language of 
its mere soldiers, and all the time that it wages a war of 
conquest, continues to repeat the formula, "we are the most 
peaceful of men," as if it were Von Moltke's own pass- word. 

There is ground for thinking that many of them actually 
believe it. One of the most repulsive features of this war 
is the way in which a spirit of Pharisaism has entered into 
the very soul of the German. Pharisaism — hypocrisy — 
cant was ever the Teutonic vice. But in the history of human 
folly, it never has been carried to such a point as in this late 
war. A nation crazed with revenge and ambition, keeps 



14 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

on thanking God for his mercy by platoons, the God which 
nine out of ten of their educated men openly or secretly 
ignore. A people who burn villages wholesale, and massacre 
peasants on system, swear that they are the most inoffensive 
of men. They heap on France every insult, and threaten 
every evil which hatred can invent, whilst whining through 
Europe that they are only seeking a safer line of frontier. 
They are never weary of calling Heaven to witness the im- 
morality of France, whilst themselves waging the most 
savage of all modern wars, with inhuman cruelty and relent- 
less hate. They for ever cry out over the falseness of France, 
whilst their own chosen mouthpiece, Bismarck, is perhaps 
the most accomplished master of fraud in modern times; 
whilst the official and literary utterances of the country 
form one system of organised falsehood; and the whole 
people gives itself up to mere stereotyped cant. 1 

This falsehood on one side or the other is no true test of 
right or wrong in this quarrel, but it is just as well to clear 
away misconceptions. No language can adequately stamp 
the untruth of French officialism and journalism through 
this war. It is simply repulsive. And few things in the 
frenzy of France have been more melancholy than the 
proneness to utter and to adopt fabrications. It is a sorry 
task to trace all the ravings of a distracted people in the 
hour of their death-struggle. But the falsehood of Germans 
throughout the war, if less wild, has been more systematic. 
German officials conceal the truth with at least as much 
skill as French distort it. In fraud, Bismarck has found no 
French match or even rival. One impudent cry succeeds 
another. Now it is to save their Holstein, now their Alsatian 
brothers; now it is the rescuing France from her corrupt 

1 We now know the whole story from the cynical Memoirs of Prince Bis- 
marck and the other official revelations (January 1908). 



BISMARCKISM 1 5 

rulers, purging Europe from French immorality, putting 
down military ambition, denouncing English partiality; 
now it is the guaranteeing their own frontier. One after 
another these shameless pretexts are taken up by word of 
command; and throughout Germany they are repeated by 
man, woman, and child with ridiculous monotony. French 
generals, and officials, and journals lie; but the French 
nation has not given itself up to organised cant at the bid- 
ding of its officers. 

I have spoken plainly my opinion about German cruelty. 
I say it most deliberately that Germans are now carrying 
on war with inhuman cruelty. War so savage, torture so 
steadily inflicted on a civil community, has never been seen 
within two generations in Europe — save once. That once 
was the Russian war of extermination in Poland. It rests 
on the German race, with their pretended culture, to have 
carried into the heart of Western Europe the horrible tra- 
ditions of Eastern barbarism. I do not intend to argue 
any isolated case. Bazeilles, Strasburg, Ablis, may per- 
chance all have been burnt by the strictest of military codes. 
I do not charge the German leaders with having (exceptions 
excepted) exceeded in acts of blood what are called the laws 
of war. I do not deny that many of them may be proved 
to be what are called military necessities. Still less do I 
charge Germans individually with any love of cruelty as 
such. But, like all people of Teutonic race, the Germans, 
though they do not love cruelty, are perfectly capable of it 
to meet their ends ; and indeed take to it with a calm inward 
satisfaction, and a businesslike completeness, which is more 
horrible even than the excesses of passion. 

What has come over the English mind that it acquiesces 
so calmly in the sanguinary acts of this war ? The Germans 
have not exactly pillaged. "The wise 'require' it call.'' 



1 6 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

But they have stripped one-third of France utterly to the 
bone. The ransacking the villager's home, seizing his cattle, 
and "requiring" his daily bread and the seed of his land, 
may be strictly according to the rules of war; but it is still 
inhuman cruelty. It deliberately reduces him to starvation. 
The bombarding the civil portion of cities may be a right 
of war, but it is still inhuman cruelty. The burning of 
towns'and villages wholesale — twenty we were glibly told 
of in one telegram from Berlin — may be a military necessity, 
but it is inhuman cruelty. Plundering citizens by threat 
of instant death, the placing them on the engines, the mas- 
sacre in cold blood of irregular troops, and still more of 
villagers suspected of aiding them, may be a mere measure 
of self-defence; but I call it inhuman cruelty. It is the 
murder of non-combatants or prisoners — and therefore 
terrorism. 

Why tell us that Napoleon did it? Napoleon was a 
monster; and generations have passed since that day. To 
murder and burn alive civil populations, — men, women, 
and children, — to burn down whole districts, to massacre 
prisoners in cold blood, and to starve a civil population, 
may be war; but it is not the less inhuman. The fact re- 
mains — laws of war or not — that no nation has ventured 
on this bloody path in Europe for generations, except, as 
said before, the Russians in Poland. Military necessity 
forsooth ! So said the Russians ; so says every invader in 
a war of extermination. But what necessity compels the 
Germans still to carry on a war that must be so carried on 
at all? What compels them, with France prostrate before 
them, still to continue this horrible course? Nothing but 
their own lust for conquest and glory. Not all the glozing 
of their truculent hypocrites, — professors or journalists, — 
who exhort them to these outrages as to acts of duty, can 



BISMARCKISM 1 7 

cloak this under the plea of self-protection. Deliberately, 
with a lie on their lips, they choose to continue a war of 
annihilation; a war in which every step is but a step into 
a deeper sea of blood and horror. Military necessity was 
ever the plea of pitiless ambition. If all this blood and 
horror, over and above all modern wars, is a military neces- 
sity of this war — then, in the name of civilisation, it is a 
social necessity to stop this war. The fact remains that, 
in mere pursuit now of military glory, the Germans are 
carrying on war as no foreign war in Europe has in this 
age been carried on, as it is an outrage to humanity to carry 
on war at all. On them, and on their children, will remain 
the curse of reviving in modern Europe the most bloody 
and barbarous traditions of the past — the wholesale wasting 
of an enemy's country, and the systematic massacre of 
civilians. 1 

Of all the horrible evils of this war, none perhaps is more 
sinister than this: the debauchery of public opinion by the 
taint of blood, the sinking back of European morality to 
the worst of the old level. Wars there have been in Europe, 
bloody and horrible enough, but for generations now they 
have been wars between regular armies. We had hoped 
and believed that what wars there were to be, were to be 
fought out as duels between set forces, and not waged like 
the wars of extermination of two Indian tribes. This hope 
has been crushed by Germany; and we have seen a war, 
not only the most gigantic in history, but one marked with 
almost every phase of antique barbarity — the wholesale 
massacre of non-combatants, the pillaging of civil property 
on system, the tyranny of a hateful conquest, the ferocity 



1 Alas I in the last thirty-five years we have often seen this barbarous 
example followed — though not in Europe. The curse of Bismarckism 
is that it has torn up the old Law of Nations (1908). 

c 



1 8 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

of martial law. And we listen to it all calmly; and feel 
reassured to know that it is all done strictly according to 
the books. Desolation and murder, sown broadcast, come 
upon us naturally enough, if nothing be done but what has 
the sanction of Tilly, or Marlborough, or Napoleon. 

It is small plea to tell us that France would have done 
the same to Germany. If so, then on her would have lighted 
the curse. But as Germany has done it, on her it rests. 
When Russia in annihilating Poland told us that the fury 
of the Poles was such that it could not be broken down unless 
by these horrible extremities — what was the answer of 
Europe ? Europe answered to her : — by what compulsion 
must you break down Poland? And so hereafter will rest 
on Germany the ban of civilised Europe. 

The continuance of this horrible conflict is fast inuring 
us to the vile code of blood. For months the journals have 
filled our minds with the loathsome cant of the camp. Bloody 
battles are sketched off for us daily with a jaunty gusto which 
is sickening. Women and children are well tutored in all 
the hideous slang of the trooper; they read of "beautiful" 
charges, and "superb" shell-practice, and of "lively" 
fusillades. Not a brutality of the man-at-arms is spared us. 
The ghastly delights of the battlefield, the dreadful indif- 
ference to life, the foul professional jargon, are served up to 
us with much patchwork word-painting, and much artificial 
joviality. This apelike glee in mimicking the tone of war 
is degrading the moral sense. And the most horrible of 
human passions — the love of destruction in its most settled 
and professional form — is nursed, and adorned, and stimu- 
lated, until it is growing to form a sort of standard of 
opinion. 

It seems necessary now again to repeat old truisms — 
that the slaughter of mankind is horrible in itself, that the 



BISMARCKISM 1 9 

trade of slaughtering mankind is a horrible one, that the 
morality of the slaughterer of mankind is necessarily a low 
one. For two generations the military type of life had been 
sinking into just odium. But now, forsooth, war is to be 
rehabilitated. The military becomes the normal form of 
life. Our civil life is to be recast. Every citizen is to be 
a soldier. Every civilian talks of guns, and shells, and 
formations, and apes the jargon of the lowest form of fight- 
ing animal. Moltke and Bismarck are the great men of 
our age. Prussia is our model state of an armed and drilled 
nation. The one great public question is the recasting 
of our military system. Our amusement is to chatter over 
the incidents of these vast butcheries. Our literature is 
the picturesque recounting of the battle or the siege. And 
thus we are falling back in public morality a century. The 
military becomes the true type of human society; some 
pitiless strategist is a hero; some unscrupulous conspirator 
is a statesman ; and the nation which is the best drilled arid 
the best armed in Europe is to go to the van of modern 
civilisation. Brutalising and senseless creed ! And this 
we owe to Prussia. 1 

It is this evil which is the most to be dreaded for the future 
— the destruction of international morality in Europe, 
and the restoration of the old military standard. To sub- 
stitute Bismarckism for Napoleonism would be a very small 
gain to civilisation. And the Prussian army is vaster, more 
anti-popular, more thoroughly professional and retrograde 
in its tone even than the French. The French military 
regime — Napoleonism itself — always rested on a revolu- 
tionary basis, and existed in a revolutionary medium. It 
was always felt that an upheaving of the people could shake 

1 And I have lived to see all this forecast too truly verified — and by 
our own countrymen in Asia and in Africa (1908). 



20 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

it to its foundations, and it was obliged to respect and some- 
times to adopt popular principles. But the Prussian army 
rests on a feudal and monarchic basis exclusively. Patri- 
otism in Prussia means obedience to the commander-in- 
chief. The ranks of society mean grades in the army. 
Thorough discipline reigns throughout it. And this, how- 
ever valuable in a military point of view, in the political 
implies the stagnation of all civil life. Thus the Prussian 
army (and for all international purposes the Prussian army 
is the Prussian Government) represents the most retrograde 
spirit in modern society, and is the natural foe of every 
element of progress. What are we to gain, therefore, by 
substituting the Prussian for the Napoleonic regime in 
Europe ? 

We are told to trust to Germany at the close of her victory 
assuming a liberal form. What are the grounds for any 
such hope? Bismarck may promise to " crown the edifice," 
as Napoleon did every Spring, and with as great result. 
We have seen the Prussian government engaging in one 
war of conquest after another ; but we never heard that the 
people could exert the smallest influence on its government. 
Why will they do so when Bismarck and Moltke have riveted 
the chains of Germany — for it is for Germany, not France, 
that they are forging chains ? What single political principle 
in Europe is due to Prussia ? Politically, Prussia is a camp, 
and the Prussian is a conscript. With all the wonderful 
intelligence, industry, culture, and energy, for which in- 
dividual Prussians cannot be too highly rated, the nation, 
as a political whole, has been ground down by drill and 
bureaucracy, of which their very state education is a part, 
to political nonentity. There is more true public life in 
Russia itself. I do not forget the strong language used by 
deputies and journalists. But neither exert the smallest 



BISMARCKISM 21 

influence over the action of the Monarchy and its Bu- 
reaucracy. 

Now the elevation of a spirit like this (a spirit the better 
side of which is seen in the antiquated pride of the old mar- 
tinet-king, and its worst in the " blood and iron" of his crafty 
minister) must tell on the public opinion of Europe. Let 
us suppose that Germany returns, having added to her 
frontiers Lorraine and Alsace, in the whole of her vast 
strength, and with the immense prestige of her unparalleled 
successes. The position of France, Germany holding 
Metz and Strasburg, is simply that of Piedmont whilst 
Austria held the Quadrilateral. Germany would hold an 
armed hand pointed at the heart of France. With her 
capital and her richest provinces almost under the guns 
of these great fortresses, France would be in every question 
at the mercy of her great neighbour. She must be the 
centre of a restless agitation, looking for allies everywhere, 
and seeking her opportunity anywhere. We well remember 
what it was for European peace to have had an Italian and 
a Polish question — what would it be to have a French 
question, France suffering a standing humiliation and 
danger? Europe would not enjoy a day of repose or peace. 

There are those who look to see Prussia actually dominat- 
ing Europe in arms. We need look for no such danger. 
Undoubtedly there are the germs of many a sinister com- 
bination. Denmark, no doubt, will fall one day a prey to 
her old despoiler. A struggle for the German subjects of 
Austria is inevitable. Holland and Belgium both have 
reason to fear. Russia, in spite of dynastic sympathies, 
must be the enemy of aggrandised Prussia. Prussia already 
coquets with the Pope and threatens Italy, no doubt as 
succeeding to the Holy Roman Empire. Patriotic murmurs 
will soon be raised to recall their erring German brothers 



22 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

in Switzerland. The theory of a German Rhine (some 
filibustering professor will explain to us) requires that it 
flows through dominions of the Emperor of Germany from 
the glaciers to the sea. They even now are calling out for 
the rescue of their lost brothers in Heligoland. 1 There are 
quarrels enough and to spare; causes and " races" enough 
to embroil Europe for a century. There is the unburied 
Holstein question, the Polish question, Panslavism, Czeckism, 
Pan- Germanism, the Rhine question, the Belgian question, 
the Heligoland question, the Papal question ; why not the 
Burgundian question, and the restoration of the empire of 
Charlemagne? If Europe is to be recast to fit the crazy 
pedantry of German professors, the Prussian spread-eagle 
will give us all a pleasant time of it. 

Now it is not necessary to suppose that Prussia is about 
to overrun Europe with her troops as she is overrunning 
France. That is not the danger. We have not come to 
that point of weakness — we non-German people of Europe, 
and perhaps even German docility would have a limit some- 
where. But what is to be feared is the passing of the undis- 
puted supremacy of force to such a power as Prussia — 
organised exclusively for war, retrograde, feudal, despotic, 
— more unscrupulous and ambitious than Napoleonism 
itself. If Prussia returns home triumphant, and mistress 
of the greatest fortresses of France, Europe is handed over 
to a generation of arming for war ; and civilisation is thrown 
back incalculably. The military and reactionary powers 
will have their own black reign again as they did from the 
treaty of Vienna. All the life of Southern Germany will 
be crushed out of her. In Northern Germany there is not, 
and never was, any political life. Germany at this moment 

1 Brothers so judiciously rescued in 1890, and so happily restored by 
our Imperialists (1908). 



BISMAE.CKISM 2$ 

is under the rule of the sword as completely as the conquered 
provinces of France. The mild German may hope and 
protest, but he is mild enough in his own country. He has 
waited, with the patience of a sentinel, for some civic life 
to be given him by his "good and pious" king and his clever, 
wise Bismarck — but he may wait for a century. Germany 
is really under martial law at this moment, and likely so to 
remain. The democratic leaders are in prison for protesting 
against a policy of annexation. Public opinion is stifled 
by police and soldiery. And the leaders of the people who 
raise a voice against militarism have something to put up 
with far more serious than the amenities of a journal. 

Do the English people seriously consider what even 
from their insular point of view this portends to them? 
The capitulation of Sedan tore up the treaties of 1856. The 
blood and sacrifices of the Crimean war are thrown away, 
or must be repeated. Which alternative will England 
choose? Russia is free, she is actually preparing to carry 
out her schemes of conquest in the East. Prussia is openly 
threatening this country. She repeats, and her drilled press 
and literature reiterate impudent charges against our neu- 
trality. There is an ominous courting of the friendship 
of America, with what end every one can see. Prussia 
openly aims at maritime power, the command of the Baltic, 
and the recovery of Heligoland. Denmark may be swal- 
lowed up, as the first step in this career. Holland may be 
the next leaf in the northern artichoke. Belgium, by the 
force of events, may be compelled to throw herself into the 
arms of France. In a word, there is hardly a country left 
without embroilment and danger. Europe is thrown into 
the cauldron to be recast, and a new Holy Alliance is forming 
on the principle of "Blood and Iron" which England must 
meet absolutely alone. 



24 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

What should be our policy? I do not hesitate to say — 
to check the progress of Prussian ambition. To check 
it by diplomacy if possible; but by arms if necessary. It 
is not in the name of France, nor of the French Republic; 
but in the highest interests of European peace and progress 
that it is the duty of England to withstand the domination 
of a new empire of the sword. It is time to raise the retro- 
grade and military weight of Prussia off Europe, and to 
force her back to her true place. How is this to be done, 
even if we wished it, men ask aghast, and what can resist 
Prussia? As if statesmanship, energy, and power had 
left this country for ever. Is this nation Holland, Belgium, 
Denmark, that it is to count for nothing in European politics ? 

In the first place it is to be done by statesmanship. If 
England threw her whole heart into it, and it was known 
that she had pledged herself to it, she could form a great 
coalition of neutral states. She should put herself at the 
head of a federation of the weak, which in itself would be 
a strong federation. She should bind Sweden, Denmark, 
Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland first in offensive and 
defensive alliances, in which each member of the union 
guaranteed the inviolability of each of the others with their 
whole force. She should put herself right by restoring all 
her foreign possessions in Europe. She might hold Heli- 
goland for the new Federation or for Denmark, to whom 
it seems to belong. She might restore Gibraltar to Spain, 
and Malta, if required, to Italy. Then if statesmanship 
be a real thing at all, Spain, Italy, Austria, all already sympa- 
thising with France, could be brought into the alliance. 
They would be feeble hands who, using such a force, and 
with the weight of all Western Europe in one, could not by 

1 Something like such a pacific alliance or entente has been at last secured, 
mainly by the King (1908). 



BISMARCKISM 25 

a moral demonstration alone cause the German to pause, 
and to conclude a reasonable peace. 

And failing this, for one, I would shrink from no con- 
sequences. If Germany, in her headstrong ambition, 
insisted on the destruction of France, and no joint effort of 
neutrals were possible, let England throw herself into the 
rescue of France with her whole forces, moral and material, 
naval and military. If the task be hopelessly beyond her 
strength, then England has ceased to be a great power, 
and must have sunk back indeed since the days of Pitt or 
Chatham or Marlborough. It is a heavy task, doubtless, 
and one not to be done in a day. But it is not hopeless. 
Let money, guns, and supplies be poured into France, with 
the aid of the English fleet, and it may be well believed that 
France could turn the tide. She has a million of men in 
arms. What she needs is time and every material of war. 
And if that did not suffice — let 100,000 men in red, equipped 
with every munition of war, be planted in some spot in 
Brittany or Normandy where, supplied and covered by the 
fleet, they might take up a new Torres Vedras. 

Then, let Paris fall or not, with the incalculable moral 
support and inexhaustible material supplies of England, 
France would not fall. She would rise more desperate 
after every defeat, and more resolved after every calamity. 
She might be driven back to Brittany or the Pyrenees. She 
might endure every agony that a nation could suffer. It 
might be years before the struggle ended. But once let it 
be known that the whole heart and power of England was 
on her side, English gold, stores, and arms pouring in at 
every port, and an English entrenched camp as a reserve, 
and the tenacity of France would do the rest; slowly the 
grip of the eagle would grow feebler, slowly the exhausted 
conquerors would withdraw, and at length the armies of 



26 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the two western nations, brother leaders of the van of civilisa- 
tion, would force back the German invader to his own 
border. Such would be the policy of Chatham, of William, 
or of Cromwell. 

It is a great task. But great nations have great tasks 
to do, and statesmanship is the doing great tasks; but it is 
a task worth every sacrifice. With France prostrate under 
the armed heel of Germany, with Germany in possession 
of Alsace and Lorraine, with that retrograde military power 
the acknowledged arbiter of Europe, Europe can know no 
disarming, no progress for a generation. I disdain to an- 
swer the canting plea that these provinces can add to the 
safety of Germany or the peace of Europe. It is obviously 
the real object of this annexation, to enable Prussia to 
maintain a vast military establishment and vantage-ground, 
from which to take Southern Germany in flank, and coerce 
her in the great struggle which is about to commence there. 
The regime of war, of conquest, of subjugation begins again ; 
and civilisation is arrested for generations. 

What still remains for France? Simply to fight on. 
France cannot be conquered. No great nation can. The 
cession of Alsace and Lorraine is not merely the surrender 
of two provinces. It is the delivering up the country, its 
capital, and its independence, bound hand and foot, to a 
ruthless neighbour. It is what no Frenchman worthy of 
the name, could assent to. " Better burn France to ashes 
rather," as Danton said. Let us take a parallel case. France 
(we will suppose), in a sudden and unprovoked war, has 
seized Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, and formed along 
the whole northern coast of Europe a network of arsenals, 
which sheltered a combined fleet far larger and stronger 
than any possible British fleet. For years she equips this 
fleet with the avowed purpose of wresting from England 



BISMARCKISM 27 

the supremacy of the sea. England rings with indignation, 
jealousy, and fear. In an evil hour an English ministry, 
without consulting the nation, hurls the country into war, 
and attacks the French fleet in its moorings. Through 
flagrant incapacity of the English Admiralty (a not incredible 
assumption) the entire navy of England is annihilated. 
The French forces invade this country. Everything goes 
down before them. They take the arsenals, and hold one- 
third of England, wasting it with fire and sword. The 
dynasty (perhaps an impossible supposition) is swept away 
for ever. London still holds out, and throughout England 
vast forces are being organised for defence. The only terms 
that the conqueror will accept are the permanent posses- 
sion of Portsmouth and Plymouth, their harbours, docks, 
and forts, with Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall, 
to be incorporated with France, on the plea that they were 
once possessions of the Dukes of Normandy, or were once 
inhabited by Bretons. These are the conquerors' terms. 
England is still not exhausted in men, money, arms, or 
material. London contains an army twice as numerous 
as its besiegers. The north of England swarms with armies. 
What Englishman will say (with his name, not with his 
initials) that he would call on his countrymen to sign such 
a peace ? The man who could do it, or talk of it, must have 
the heart of a slave. 

And yet there are men quite filled with moral indignation 
that Frenchmen can refuse such a peace. They talk quite 
grandly of the guilt of refusing such terms. How many 
a lost cause have Englishmen applauded — the Polish, 
the Circassian, the Arab defences, the defence of Hungary 
and Rome in 1849, °f tne Danes in 1864, of the Confederates 
in 1866, was heroic in the eyes of most of those who are in- 
sulting the defiance of France. And now these hypocrites 



28 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

— who hate France — call on her to yield in the name of 
peace and good sense. In the meantime the case of France 
is not hopeless. Every day her spirit seems to grow more 
resolute. Paris may fall — may have fallen before these 
pages are published — but that is not the end. It may 
be that this is but the beginning of the war, and not its end. 
The wealth of France is boundless, her population is un- 
exhausted, her natural resources infinite. She has nearly 
a million of men under arms; she has six or seven armies 
in the field, and all her seaboard and ports untouched. It is 
the fashion to sneer at her efforts, to deny her courage, and 
to undervalue her resources. For my part, in spite of wild 
speeches and divided counsels, I call the resolute front of 
her actual rulers heroic. I will not be curious to note their 
faults or their follies. I will forgive them and honour them 
for carrying on the traditions of the great Danton, and for 
uttering defiance in the midst of unparalleled disasters. 
I call the rush to arms of all able-bodied Frenchmen heroic, 
and in the main I accept that as a fact. I call the willingness 
of Frenchmen to bear every extremity rather than a dis- 
honourable peace heroic. And above all, I call the defence 
of Paris, the unity of its multiform population, and the 
resolve of its attitude heroic. 

All this is much out of fashion now. It is easy to make 
sport of the ravings of a distracted people in such a crisis, 
to repeat the murmurs of the cravens, and to paint pictures 
of panic here, bombast there; of suspicion in one place, 
delusion in other, and dissensions everywhere. We all 
forget how France now lives as under a microscope, and 
thousands of unfriendly eyes are watching every spasm. 
We all forget too how stupidly a Teutonic people mistakes 
the excitement of a Keltic people for weakness. Their 
ways are not our ways ; but it does not follow that big words 



BISMARCKISM 29 

go always with little deeds. It is easy for the victors to be 
dignified and calm; easier especially for a people of such 
admirable self-possession and so perfectly drilled as the 
Germans. But where is the nation in the agony of such 
mortal strife that would escape confusion, divided counsels, 
and wild talk ? The energy, unity, and patriotism of France 
in the first shock are far greater than was shown either by 
Prussian, German, or Austrian after Austerlitz, Jena, and 
Wagram, greater than was shown by the great American 
people in the first months after Bull's Run. Let us only 
trust that if so horrible a catastrophe ever should befall 
this nation, all civil strife and parties may be unknown, 
that all administrators may act with dignity and judgment, 
that false hopes and wild speech may be as little heard as 
ungenerous suspicions; that upon the annihilation of the 
whole regular force and the loss of the whole material of 
war in the country, a million of citizens may be gathered 
in arms in two months ; that seven armies may be organised, 
equipped, and armed ; that bloodshed, fire, famine, and 
pillage may not break the spirit of our people; that our 
citizens may calmly submit to starvation and bombardment, 
and that throughout the length and breadth of the island 
there may rise up only one cry — War to the knife, rather 
than dishonourable peace. 1 

But come what may — if France drive out the invader, 
or sink under his weight — certain considerations remain 
for the statesman's attention. This war involves social 
changes greater than any since 1789. The war has been 
caused by social movements, and it must issue in still greater. 
Bismarck and Napoleon were each driven to divert the 

1 As we know, within two months after this was written, Paris was starved 
into surrender; the treachery of Bazaine sacrificed the last regular army 
of France, social enmity and the selfish apathy of the South ruined the de- 
fence; and Peace was made (ic 



30 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

energy of their respective nations to foreign war by the up- 
heaving of the popular spirit at home. The imminent 
danger to his own throne at last drove Napoleon into war. 
The very disasters of France are due to the same cause. 
France (we must never forget) is still heaving with internal 
revolution. There the great social struggle between capital 
and labour, that prolonged struggle on which England is 
entering, and to which Germany is approaching, is already 
far advanced. The real cause of the war, of the disasters, 
of the powerlessness of France, is one and the same : — 
that France is in the convulsion of a social revolution. She 
is divided against herself. Workman and employer, rich 
and poor, stand apart in two camps, distrusting each other, 
counter-working each other; and thus a prey to political 
adventurers. France is thus for a time weak; and falls 
in war an easy victim to the unity of Germany, in which, 
from its more backward social condition, all this crisis is 
yet to come. It is very probable also that the gradual 
disintegration of France into smaller political aggregates, 
a process which awaits the larger states of Europe, has already 
begun. There are now three or four French political units. 1 
But the moment France has weathered the storm, the 
impulse given to her social movement will be enormous. 
The Republic has been established ; and the Republic itself 
is the only institution in France which has not been dis- 
credited. France, too, has been happily relieved of that 
incubus which has hitherto rested on progress — her army. 
Those 350,000 praetorians — those marshals, generals, and 
staff ; guns, standards, material, and eagles — the whole 
Chauvinist camp, from Emperor to drummer-boy, have 
been swept into space and into ignominy. The professional 

1 The disintegrating process and the cause of anti-militarism have now 
reached an ominous degree (1908). 



BISMARCKISM 3 1 

soldier in France is morally dead. Her army, the curse 
of Europe and of civilisation, has gone out with an ill savour. 
It was not the decheance of Napoleon that was proclaimed 
in Paris on the 4th of September, but the decheance of mili- 
tarism. The soldier is become an anachronism ; the symbol 
of national degradation. The only sort of honour has been 
won by workmen and peasant volunteers — a true citizen- 
army of national guard. For the first time in French history, 
the workmen of the great towns are armed and organised, 
and the whole of the new army from top to bottom is es- 
sentially democratic. In a military sense, this may as yet 
be a weakness ; but, in a political sense, it means the emanci- 
pation of the people. 

Even after the fall of Paris, the war may be indefinitely 
prolonged. But it must end some day. And then, with 
France exhausted, stripped of everything, wealth and the 
means of wealth annihilated, she will be in the position of 
a new country ; capital will be in search of labour, and labour 
will be master of the situation. However long the war 
continue, and however great the sufferings of France, it 
is the rich who really suffer. The poor, so long as they keep 
their own skins whole and are not actually starving, do not 
lose much, for the simple reason that they have nothing to 
lose. A Prussian invasion to them involves no greater 
personal loss than individual distress, hard times, or a lock- 
out — indeed, far less, for they are the most indispensable 
part of the public, and must be fed. 

On the conclusion of peace, therefore, the people, socially 
and politically, will be masters of the destinies of France. 
and ultimately of Europe. All that France loses in material 
ascendancy in Europe, she will gain in moral ascendancy. 
Peace cannot be made in such a way but that relatively 
labour shall be left in the ascendant. It was so after the 



32 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

hurly-burly of 1793, and it will be so again after 1870. And 
the workmen are the only people who have upheld the hon- 
our of France. Thus, however France may be materially 
crippled, the cause of the Republic and of labour will come 
to the front. Even if the Republic itself collapse in the 
strife, for France is still divided into two camps — the rich 
and the poor — the republican element will be strong. 
And France will retain and increase her moral influence. 
Not only Napoleonism and militarism are dechus hence- 
forth in France, but something else ; and that is, the indolent 
extravagance of the rich. The degraded and selfish pomp 
of the third Empire is a thing of the past. For once since 
1793 liberty and equality have begun to be realities. 

But the people in France will not stand alone. Round 
them will gather the people and the republicanism of Europe. 
In all the sufferings and humiliations of France, this cause 
will gain a new impulse. From henceforward the French 
people alone, even in the eyes of German democrats, will 
be felt to bear the standard of progress. The dangerous 
designs of Prussia, her retrograde ambition, will be the 
great enemies of the people all over the world. Round 
the workmen of France those of England have long gathered ; 
those of Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and Germany herself 
are gathering. The issue is so critical for the future, and the 
dangers from the reactionary power are so serious, that they 
override all national and local questions. Now it will neither 
be England, France, nor Germany; but Republic against 
Monarchy. Round the Prussian throne gather all the retro- 
grade principles ; round the French people all the progressive. 
In this great issue, national and party questions dwindle. 
All governments will henceforward be alike to us. Whig or 
Tory, and the rest are but vestry-room cries. The one cause 
in which every other is merged, is the cause of the People. 



BISMARCKISM 33 

Not that this great struggle need be one of arms and of 
bloodshed. It is essentially a moral struggle ; one of prin- 
ciples. The needle-gun has beaten down the army of 
Napoleon, but it cannot beat back French ideas ; of all others, 
not the social ideas of the French people. Purged in the 
fire of this crisis, these ideas will regain new purity and life. 
They are swaying and heaving English society. Germany 
itself is honeycombed with them. And long and fierce ere 
long will be the struggle in Germany itself between Bis- 
marckism and Industrialism — between blood and iron 
and the German people. But whatever else may be the 
issue, we may be sure that the real spirit that is ultimately 
to triumph after this frightful catastrophe will not be a 
military one. In spite of all the fighting, in spite of the 
deadly hatred of race begotten by this contest, and the un- 
dying spirit of revenge and pride it will leave behind, the 
industrial regime is antagonistic to the military; and the 
increased ascendancy of the people must be fatal in the long 
run to militarism. 

There is much in this, too, very worthy of thought by 
our own governing classes. The attitude of the French 
Republic and people under the German yoke has sent a 
thrill through the English workmen greater than anything 
which has happened since 1848. They are watching their 
own rulers with ill-restrained impatience and indignation. 
To them the cause of labour and the Republic is one and 
the same all over the world. The interests of English 
landlords, of British merchants and shopkeepers, of Whig 
and Tory governments, of Liberal or Conservative cabals, 
to them are dust in the balance. They are loudly and 
distinctly calling on their rulers to save the French Republic 
from extinction by German invaders. For that they are 
ready for sacrifices in blood and money. 



34 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

One thing they will not suffer. They will not see their gov- 
erning classes shrinking from any real action in Europe, and 
timidly reducing this country to a nullity, whilst feebly patch- 
ing up our own rotten military system at home by resorting to 
the device of tyranny abroad. A real reorganisation of the 
army in a national sense is yet far off. Really to make it 
such an army as the Prussian is simply impossible. This 
English nation, at any rate, will never be drilled into Bis- 
marckism. And any feeble attempts to Prussianise this 
country, to raise a conscription, in fact — to force the work- 
ing people into the ranks, will be met and resisted by all 
and every means. The attempt forcibly to enroll English 
citizens will be stopped by every resource known to a people 
defending their personal liberty — the ultima ratio populi 
not even excepted. There are men enough in this country 
quite capable of seeing what is meant, and of organising 
the national resistance. To attempt such a plot against 
all the traditions of English liberty would be the end of 
governing class, monarchy, and constitution. No blood- 
tax will ever be levied in English homes. 

November 15, 1870. 



n 

THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 

{January 17, 1871) 

The following Essay was written during the Franco-German 
War in the middle of January, and was the first article 
in the Fortnightly Review of February 18 J 1 (vol. ix.). 
At the time of writing Paris was on the eve of capitulat- 
ing through famine, and Gambetta was calling on the 
country to continue the struggle. The writer was still 
sanguine that England would be roused to take a part. 
He and his friends had organised a great meeting of 
Trades Unionists in St. James's Hall in support of the 
French Republic (January 10) ; and many influential 
sections of English society joined that cause. The govern- 
ment of Mr. Gladstone declined to interfere in any way, 
as may be read in vol. ii. of the Life. Now that we have 
the Memoirs of all the chief politicians concerned, English, 
German, and French, the writer sees no reason to modify 
the language he used in 1871, nor can he admit that the 
policy he advocated was either impracticable or unwise 
(1908). 

The true question which this war presents for English- 
men to answer, is not whether France or Germany have 
done most to provoke each other, nor whether France or 
Germany have the larger sum of wrongs to avenge, nor 
whether it is desirable for Germany to be one and to be 

35 



36 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

powerful, nor yet whether much that is vicious be not mingled 
in French policy and the French character. The real 
question is none of these; and it is sophistry only which 
can lead us off upon these issues. The true question is a 
very plain one. It is this. Is it for the interest of civilisa- 
tion, or of England, that France should be trampled on and 
dismembered by Germany ? 

I say the former are all false issues, and have little to do 
with the matter before us. Let us grant that the larger 
share in provoking this long-preparing struggle must be 
laid at the door of France ; as I certainly shall grant she 
wantonly commenced it. Is it enough for a nation to have 
wrongfully entered upon war, to make us rejoice at seeing 
it torn in pieces ; rejoice over a policy which must hand over 
Europe to discord and hate? To sum up the historical 
wrongs of Germany may exercise the ingenuity of biographers ; 
but are politicians ready to make retaliation the new key 
of international relations? A man may devoutly desire 
the unity of Germany, without finding it precisely in the 
smoking ruins of Paris. It may be the best guarantee of 
peace that Germany should be powerful. It is a bold leap 
from that to welcoming six months of pillage, fire, and 
slaughter. We may wish to see Germany both safe and 
strong, without caring to see France mangled and frantic 
with despair. We never deny that the French temper has 
many a blot, and French history many a foul page. We 
may even hate French folly and vice. What nation has 
not its own follies and its own vices? What puling Judas 
is he who would sneer away the life of a nation by these 
hypocrite's laments? We have never yet admitted that 
the vices of national character entitled one race to come 
forward as the executioner of another, to wreak its hate and 
fill its greed in the name of national morality. We have 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 37 

ceased to regard a conquering horde as the chosen avenger 
of God, or national disaster as the same with national 
guilt. 

We may admit all these propositions of the apologists 
of Prussian invasion, and yet the case is not answered, nor 
even touched. Suppose France wrong at first, to have 
been wrong in the past, to have been and to be, as a nation, 
foolish and guilty. Suppose that the unity of Germany 
is the greatest of human goods, and its supremacy the best 
hope of mankind; what has all this to do with the long- 
drawn torture of France, with the firing of her citizens, 
and the trampling on her provinces and her children? The 
greatness of Germany is not secured, the guilt of France is 
not cured, by dragging out a brutalising and fiendish war, 
until agony itself seems to sustain life and to inspire de- 
fiance. All the specious grounds on which some still try 
to justify all this, no more justify this war than they justify 
Pandemonium. There is but one true question. What 
good end requires all this fire and this blood? Is it for the 
interest of civilisation that France should be trodden down 
and dismembered by Germany? 

To say that France is being trampled on and dismembered, 
is to use words far short of the truth. For six months one- 
third of France has been given up to fire and sword. For 
300 or 400 miles vast armies have poured on. Every village 
they have passed through has been the victim of what is 
only organised pillage. Every city has been practically 
sacked, ransacked on system; its citizens plundered, its 
civil officials terrorised, imprisoned, outraged, or killed. 
The civil population has been, contrary to the usage of 
modern warfare, forced to serve the invading armies, brutally 
put to death, reduced to wholesale starvation and desolation. 
Vast tracts of the richest and most industrious districts of 



38 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Europe have been deliberately stripped and plunged into 
famine, solely in order that the invaders might make war 
cheaply. Irregular troops, contrary to all the practices of 
war, have been systematically murdered, and civil popula- 
tions indiscriminately massacred, solely to spread terror. 
A regular system of ingenious terrorism has been directed 
against civilians, as horrible as anything in the history of 
civil or religious wars. Large and populous cities have been, 
not once, but twenty, thirty, forty times bombarded and 
burnt, and the women and children in them wantonly slaugh- 
tered, with the sole object of inflicting suffering. All this 
has been done, not in licence or passion, but by the calcu- 
lating ferocity of scientific soldiers. And, lastly, when the 
last chance of saving Paris was gone, and it became a matter 
of a few weeks of famine, they must needs fire and shatter 
a city of 2,000,000 of souls. 

Let us remember that all this was done and carried on for 
five months after France had sued for peace in the dust; 
and had offered what was practically everything except 
her national independence, and the honour and self-respect 
of every Frenchman. It is well known that there were no 
serious terms which France would have rejected short of 
dismemberment. To give up 2,000,000 of the best citizens 
of France, and make them permanent prisoners to Germany, 
is what no nation in Europe would do whilst its powers 
remained. Let Englishmen quietly contemplate surrender- 
ing Sussex and Hampshire to an invader, to be permanently 
annexed to France. This is what Frenchmen are coolly 
exhorted to do. But it was much more than this. To give 
the possession of Metz and Strasburg, the Moselle and the 
Vosges, to united Germany, is simply to make France her 
prisoner, to make France what Piedmont was with Austria 
in the Quadrilateral, what England would be if the whole 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 



39 



coast from Dover to the Isle of Wight were made permanently 
French soil. 

And because Frenchmen rejected these terms, terms 
which the vilest of Englishmen would, in their own case, 
turn from with scorn, Prussia has poured on, revelling in 
this orgy of blood. In politics there are no abstract rights. 
All matters between nations are a balance of advantages. 
And even if there were, on the side of Germany, some decent 
claim for what they sought, humanity will brand the people 
that insisted on that claim through all the hideous cost which 
it involved. A gambler (to pursue their favourite metaphor) 
may have a fair claim to the stakes he has won ; but we still 
call him a murderer who deliberately kills the loser that he 
may seize them. The language-boundary may seem such 
an obvious arrangement to a pedant at his desk; and the 
strategic frontier may run glibly off the journalist's pen. 
One nation may be most moderate in its demand ; and the 
other may be most blind in its resistance. But if, in the 
hard proof of facts, this natural boundary or this moderate 
claim can be won solely by desolating a million homes, and 
by turning provinces into one vast charnel-house, it is only 
the tyrant with the heart of steel who seeks that end at such 
a cost. 

But I had forgotten "the security" and "the permanent 
peace" of Germany! The security of Germany which, 
unapt for war, with only a few poor fortresses on the Rhine, 
and but a million of mere armed citizens, will never be able 
to rest for fear of France, without a new line of French 
fortresses, strongholds, and mountain passes. She will 
never be really safe till she has 2,000,000 of Frenchmen 
writhing under her grasp on her French border. The poor 
wolves must have a fold to protect them from the greedy 
sheep. And how can the great German and the great French 



40 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

nations ever dwell, side by side, in unity and peace hereafter, 
until every French field has been trampled by the Uhlan, 
till every French home has given up its one or two dead, 
or at least smelt the petroleum of our highly-cultivated 
troopers? Once plant in every French heart a feeling that 
a German is a red Indian savage on a scalping party; sow 
a blood feud which the very infants may suck in with their 
mothers' milk, and we shall have ample security and a per- 
manent peace evermore ! 

Can we doubt that the real object of Germany is the 
dismemberment of France? I know that the apologists 
of Prussia here, straining out the last dregs of captious ob- 
jection, ask us sometimes, with an air of honest doubt, how 
we know that Bismarck insists on the dismemberment of 
France; and one of these advocates has told us, almost 
indignantly, that if he thought the Prussian had taken Metz 
(for instance) with any intention of appropriating it for 
himself, he for one would be the last, etc., etc. To this 
point is the case of Prussia reduced ! How do we know, 
forsooth, that Germany insists on incorporating all Alsace 
and at least half Lorraine, the Vosges, the Moselle, Strasburg, 
Metz, and a string of French fortresses, the whole "language- 
boundary," as the cant runs, and something more, to be 
settled by Count Moltke? We know it because, whatever 
journalists here may find it convenient to say, every utter- 
ance in Germany, official and semi-official, combines to tell 
\is so. We all know now how completely Count Bismarck 
controls and inspires the whole well-affected press of Germany, 
and muzzles the ill-affected; how officials and aspirants to 
office watch his every look; how journalists and professors 
truckle to his nod. With one consent they all tell us that 
Germany must have at least all this, and an indefinite some- 
thing more. If the words of official journals and publicists 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 4 1 

in high favour are worth anything when they assure us that 
Count Bismarck wants nothing but a united and peaceful 
Germany, we may trust them not to misrepresent him when 
they tell us he wants Alsace and Lorraine. To such a length 
has the belief of this run, that Count Bismarck cannot afford 
to disappoint it. And yet, seeing the set of this current, 
and the concurrence of all who were supposed to represent 
him, he has never directly or indirectly attempted to check 
it. Whether Count Bismarck demands Alsace and Lorraine 
or not, it is plain that Germany does, and believes them to 
be hers as completely as if peace were signed. Men of 
sense judge matters of politics by what seems reasonable 
on a balance of probabilities, and cannot be stopped to an- 
swer every wild suggestion of an advocate whose case is 
desperate. 

Whatever Count Bismarck may find it at present con- 
venient to say, or not to say, it is plain to any one of common 
sense that Germany most undoubtedly does demand large 
provinces of France, several of her chief fortresses, and a 
long line of strongholds. If not, if Germany is continuing 
the war for only some small object, even let us say for Stras- 
burg, the invasion assumes a still more wanton character. 
Practical politicians will not strain the excited words of 
M. Jules Favre quite literally, pronounced as they were in 
September; nor can they doubt that after an unbroken 
succession of fresh calamities, Frenchmen would have been 
inclined to terms had the Germans really been content with 
anything short of the dismemberment of their country. 
Had Germany no such end, then the last four months of 
horror have had no purpose but to satisfy the lust of military 
glory. But as every utterance of those Germans who had 
the best right to know has declared, so every act in the 
dealing with the conquered provinces has proved, that the 



42 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

wrenching off most vital members of the French nation is 
the very least of the demands of Germany. 

It may well be that Count Bismarck's ultimate intentions 
are not yet fully known. But it is not that he will ask less, 
but a great deal more, than has yet been claimed for him. 
When did he ever yet stay his hand in open violence, except 
that he saw his way to his end by artifice? If he gave up 
forcing on the Prussian people his system of army exten- 
sion, it was only to rouse their military passions more fiercely 
by corrupting them with baits to their vanity. When he 
closed the war against Denmark, it was only that he saw 
his way to seizing her territory by treachery and fraud. 
When he made peace after Sadowa, it was because he saw 
that secret diplomacy could thenceforth effect the rest of 
his programme. Peace or war, fraud or force, are with 
him only different means to the same end — the mili- 
tary aggrandisement of Prussia. He uses both alternately, 
always in the same onward path. Like the lion in the fable, 
if he is great in bringing down the prey, he is yet greater 
in securing the whole of it to himself by chicanery or threats. 
And it is to this man, as false and as insatiate as the ideal 
of Macchiavelli, that Europe is to confide for wisdom and 
moderation. 

It is but too true that we have not Count Bismarck's 
real demands. For my part, I should wonder if the world 
has yet heard the half of them. His enemies as yet have 
found that to make peace with Count Bismarck is as hard 
a bargain as to continue war with him ; perhaps even a harder. 
The greatest of the German chiefs loudly declare that they 
will be satisfied with nothing short of reducing France to 
a second or a third-rate Power. One of the foremost long 
since explained this to mean that she was to be placed in 
the position of Spain. Others use the phrase "of annihilat- 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 



43 



ing the power" of France. The "Red Prince," as they 
delight to call him in the Mohican dialect of the camp, 
announced his intention of "destroying the power" of France. 
Now, when have these military chiefs not kept their threats? 
Morally speaking, they are men on the level of the Black 
Prince, Wallenstein, or Charles the Twelfth — relics of a 
past age; strong, able, born soldiers; of an insatiable am- 
bition, and scorning everything but military honour. To 
them the annihilation of France is just as worthy an object 
as it was to Catherine of Russia to destroy Poland or to 
crush Turkey. They honestly believe themselves capable 
of it. What is to prevent their attempting it ? The Prussian 
soldier-caste conceives the destruction of France to be the 
most glorious of all achievements ; and the Prussian soldier- 
caste is absolute master for the present of the German 
people. Count Bismarck is but the organ of that caste, 
its one man of genius who has seen how to dress up that 
singular mediaeval figure as the champion of modern ideas, 
and the leader of the people. But Count Bismarck has 
not changed the lanzknecht heart within that caste; it 
beats fiercely within him, too. And though he can force 
its tongue to talk in the language of modern statesmen, its 
true nature is to be found in men to whom pity is unknown, 
and progress a by-word, men between whom and modern 
civilisation there is a feud as deep as between backwoodsmen 
and Sioux. These are the men — no boasters, and no mad- 
men — who have declared in tones not loud but deep, for 
the annihilation of France as a great Power. 

What is to stand between these men and their end ? The 
intelligence of Germany? But every one who knows Ger- 
many has seen — for my part I have seen for twenty years — 
gathering up in the minds of the literary and military classes 
of Prussia a hatred of France, Frenchmen, and French ideas 



44 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

more deadly than anything we know of in race-feuds. And 
with this hatred there went a deep, fierce thirst to humble 
France one day in the dust. I do not pretend that this feeling 
existed outside the soldier and the academic class. In both, 
I believe, it was based on mortified pride. Prussians, con- 
scious of their wonderful power both for war and in thought, 
were stung with rage when they saw how little their unap- 
proachable pre-eminence was recognised in Europe, and how 
much French egotism and versatility had carried off from 
them their legitimate honours. Be the cause what it may, 
men who have long watched this intense hatred, existing, I 
admit, in only two classes, and of course not in all members 
of them, such men have felt and insisted for years that the 
most gigantic war in history must be the issue of it. 

It has come ; and this hatred has filled its maw, and has 
swollen to incredible proportions. What, then, is to stop it 
from working out its avowed end — the annihilation of France 
as a great Power ? The Crown Prince ? And men can build 
all their hopes on a life, which a stray Chassepot bullet may 
end, to give us for twenty years the regency of the Red Prince. 
Who is to stop it? The intelligence of Germany, now em- 
ployed in inventing apologies for every act of aggression ? The 
good sense of the German people ? — But the German people 
are now only the German rank and file, and public opinion is 
insubordination. The Great Powers of Europe ? — But they 
are employed in doing reverence to the new Emperor, with 
the ministers of "happy England" at their head. Let us 
rest assured that the Prussian chiefs will give up their project 
of annihilating the power of France for one cause only — that 
they find it impossible. Till they find it impossible they will 
try, in spite of the conviction of honest burghers in Fatherland 
that they are a quiet home-loving race, and in spite of goody- 
goody platitudes from courtly professors. 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 45 

Count Bismarck has certainly not told us his ultimate de- 
mands. They will include all that has yet been asked for in 
territory with a large addition (perhaps that of Nancy and the 
whole of Lorraine). But there will be other demands not 
necessarily of territory and perhaps not immediately disclosed, 
the effect of which will be to leave France absolutely at the 
mercy of Germany. Austria is now of less account in Ger- 
many than she was at the moment of peace, and Denmark is 
also of less, account in the Baltic than when she gave up the 
struggle. Count Bismarck is a swordsman who gives wounds 
from which his adversaries do not recover ; but from which 
they grow weaker and weaker. And when he wipes from 
his sword the blood shed in this great war, it will be to 
leave France permanently crippled. Who or what is to 
stay him ? 

Let us take merely the already announced demands of 
Prussia, and see how France will stand at the end of the war. 
There will first be an enormous war indemnity. Its sum- 
total will, in truth, be something as yet unconceived. It will 
be measured, however, not by the demands of Germany, but 
by the limit of what it is possible by direct or indirect means 
to squeeze out of France. There will then be the prostration 
of France by the exhaustion of the war, and the desolation and 
famine of about one-third of her area. She will probably be 
compelled to cede some of her colonies, and may possibly be 
restricted in her standing army. Metz, Strasburg, with the 
whole chain of fortresses on the Moselle and Vosges line from 
Longwy to Belfort will form the rampart, the guns of which are 
directed upon her heart. The whole of the French will thus 
be added to the whole of the German strongholds along the 
left district of the Rhine, and consolidated into a complex 
chain more tremendous than anything in Europe. It will 
be the Austrian Quadrilateral multiplied tenfold ; a line for 



46 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

defence preposterously overdone ; for offence almost irresist- 
ible. This vast line of forts will hold the east of France in a 
vice. Within their walls 100,000 men may easily in peace 
be housed, and around them 500,000 may easily in war be 
sheltered. They are ten days' march from Paris. And be- 
tween them and Paris not a single fortress, not a single mili- 
tary depot, and scarcely a single defensible line of country 
exists. 

Now, without giving too much importance to strategic 
frontiers, it is impossible to be blind to what follows when a 
strong power posts itself in a menacing position. If Antwerp 
in French hands would be a pistol pointed at the heart of Eng- 
land, if Sebastopol was a standing menace to Constantinople, 
if the Quadrilateral gave Austria the command of North Italy, 
then France, with nothing between her capital and this vast 
strategic line, would be prostrate at the feet of Germany. 
A Power which commands a million of men, with the over- 
whelming superiority now proved in a hundred victories, pos- 
sessing along the left side of the Rhine the chief of all the great 
fortresses of Europe, and a quadruple quintuple network of 
strongholds in which the resources of nature have been used 
by the skill of two nations, would hold France in the hollow 
of her hand. A fortress is as useful for the most part for 
offence as for defence, and with the whole of the eastern for- 
tresses of France turned over to Germany, and the heart and 
capital of France turned naked to their guns, Germany would 
be as absolutely mistress of France as Austria in Mantua 
and Verona was mistress of Lombardy and Venetia. Hand 
over Alsace and Lorraine, and France stands disarmed — the 
prisoner of armed Germany. It is easy for those who turn 
the selfish growl of the tradesmen into a sneer, to cry out with 
a gibe — "What are two or three departments out of seventy? 
what are two millions out of forty ? now you are beaten, pay 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 47 

up the stakes, and for God's sake let us get to business!" 
So he with the money-bag : but politicians of common sense 
know that this is no mere question of surrendering broad 
provinces or even of giving up good citizens. It is not a 
prince losing an appanage, or a nation losing a subject prov- 
ince. It is the life or death of France as a great Power. It 
is her independence as a nation. It is whether she shall be 
one of the Powers of Europe, or the State prisoner of Imperial 
Germany. 

" France," say the optimists, "will be always a great 
Power, come what may." Perhaps so; but not if the Prus- 
sian chiefs have their way. The wretched juggle about the 
language, and the old possessions of the Reich, the whole 
antiquarian twaddle about Elsass and Lothringen, form 
only one of Bismarck's tricks to amuse the bookworms; 
who, good, silly souls, are flapping their wings with the glee 
they would feel if some one turned up the real sword of Barba- 
rossa, or proposed to revive the worship of Odin. " The sword 
of Barbarossa!" cry the learned geese, "es lebe der Kaiser! 
let us try if it will cut off men's heads. Oh, beautifully ! 
See how they fly off, and how the corpses writhe ! Lieb 
Vaterland, magst ruhig seyn !" So do the professors rejoice 
exceedingly. For political childishness and social immoral- 
ity no one comes near your true Dryasdust. So throughout 
all Germany Teufelsdrockh, with immense glee, is airing 
the biographies of the Imperial vassals. Then, again, all the 
learned strategic stuff about the line of the Vosges, and 
the indispensability of this, and the importance of that to 
the defence of Fatherland, and the mysterious references 
to the omniscient Moltke, are just another amusement for 
the journalists and soldiers at home. Mephistopheles, who 
is as relentless as he is artful, laughs his harsh laugh. Bah ! 
let the pedants bring home their lost German brothers, with 



48 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

hoch-Teutsch lays, and the wiseacres discuss the defensive 
powers of the new German frontier; are the real chiefs of 
Prussia the men to play these academic pranks, or fight for 
what they have got fifty times over? Their real end is a 
very plain one — the annihilation of France as an indepen- 
dent Power. Jugglery about language-boundaries and strate- 
gic frontiers (in its defensive sense) will soon be swept aside, 
and the real purpose of Prussian policy will soon be disclosed 
— such a settlement as will leave France prostrate before 
Germany. Bismarck swore to drive Austria out of Germany. 
He has done it, and she clings still struggling to its borders. 
Bismarck and his captains have sworn, too, to drive France 
(practically) out of Europe. And, if they have their will, 
they will not rest till they have done it. That is what the 
language -boundary and the Vosges line, in sober truth, comes 
to at last ; and what is to prevent them from insisting on it ? 
The heads of the military caste in Prussia feel towards France 
what the Roman aristocracy felt towards Carthage. Delenda 
est Carthago is their policy, and old Blucher was their Cato. 
The pedants may go on maundering most beautifully about 
Teutonic civilisation ; but the caste will pursue their end as 
coolly as if the said pedants were actual, as well as meta- 
phorical, bookworms. 

The most dreadful part of all this is that peace, even on 
any terms now demanded by Germany, is not a peace, but 
a truce. We have it on the best possible authority, that 
of Count Bismarck. In his cynical frankness, he told us 
that he knew that France would renew the conflict, and he 
only wanted a position of superiority to meet it. The truth 
is that it suits neither the welfare nor the policy of Prussia 
to complete the destruction of France at once. Place her 
in a situation of overwhelming mastery, and she would prefer 
to take her own time. Prussia did not swallow Denmark 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 49 

at one mouthful, nor drive Austria from Germany entirely 
in the seven weeks' war. But she has planted herself in 
such a position that she can deal with Denmark or deal with 
Austria much as she pleases; and she is assuredly about 
to do so. With such a settlement as Prussia exacts from 
France, she can begin again, and finish her task whenever 
she pleases. There was a first, a second, and a third par- 
tition of Poland, arranged at convenient intervals, without 
too exhausting efforts. And there was a first, and a second, 
and a third Punic War. As Rome dealt with Carthage, as 
Prussia dealt with Poland, and as she has since dealt with 
Austria, so will Count Bismarck deal with France. It 
might be too hard a task, Europe might be alarmed, if all 
were done at a blow. But, once place Prussia upon the 
prostrate body of disarmed France, and the rest is a question 
of time. No one can imagine, even in the most maudlin 
hour of optimism, that France can long endure such a lot. 
Her two millions of oppressed citizens, her sense of helpless- 
ness, and the intolerable weight of humiliation, will goad 
her in some evil hour to a fresh desperate effort. She will 
rush to arms again like the Poles, or the Carthaginians, 
without a chance, and almost without a hope; and with a 
like result. A nation of forty millions of men are not thrust 
from their ancient place in the world by one war, however 
crushing; nor are races nowadays partitioned and annexed 
in a single campaign, however triumphant. The seizure of 
Silesia was a splendid feat of arms, and Austria was crushed 
for the time. But even in that age Frederick well knew 
that it was but a truce, to be followed as certainly as night 
follows day by the Seven Years' War. And France is more 
than Austria, as Alsace and Lorraine are more than Silesia. 
And so Frederick's successor tells Europe, with the harsh 
laugh, what, indeed, we know, and hear with a shudder, 



50 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

that even this horrible war is but the first act; and when 
he makes peace it will be nothing but a truce. 1 

The prospect, then, which the statesmen of Europe have 
before them is this : — This fearful war is but the begin- 
ning of an epoch of war ; it is, in fact, but a first campaign. 
A new Polish question, a new Venetian subject-province, is 
established on far larger proportions, and in the centre of 
Europe. The population to be torn from France is even 
more patriotic and more warlike than are either Venetians 
or Poles. And certainly France is stronger than Austria, 
and occupies a more central position. But this is not merely 
a question of subjecting a province to foreign rule; it is 
exposing the nation from which it is torn to permanent help- 
lessness. It is easy to say that Austria gave up Venetia, 
the kingdom of the Netherlands gave up Belgium, Italy 
ceded Savoy, and Denmark Schleswig-Holstein. These 
examples in no case apply. In all of them the ceded prov- 
inces were not a source of strength, but of weakness. They 
lay outside the true area of the nation which ceded them, 
and belonged by many ties to the nation that received them. 
In the case of Alsace and Lorraine, all these circumstances 
are reversed. They form an integral part of France, socially, 
economically, and geographically; in every sense except in 
some wretched antiquarian pretence that could be found in 
any case. They can only be torn from France by the sword, 
and retained by oppression. And to tear them from France 
is to expose her to standing helplessness. The true parallel 
to the case is simply this : — What would England be if 
Hampshire and Sussex were annexed to a foreign country, 

1 We all know now how this danger was averted — or perhaps only ar- 
rested — by the marvellous recovery of France, and largely by the inter- 
position of Russia. We know how a renewal of the war in 1875 was P re " 
vented by the act of the Czar and Queen Victoria. I wish I could think 
the danger now passed (1908). 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 



51 



whose armies were posted in a network of arsenals and 
strongholds along their entire sea-coast. 

We hear it thoughtlessly said: — "Well, other nations 
have ceded provinces, and lost territory ; why is it so terrible 
for France to do the like, or for Frenchmen to change their 
nationality?" It is sufficient to say that in every case in 
this nineteenth century in w T hich provinces have been ceded, 
with the exception of Nice (which is yet a standing menace 
to Europe), it has been done in the name of nationality, 
and not in defiance of it. Colonies, alienated provinces, 
and the like, have been ceded; but in no single case has a 
vital and integral part of a nation, and one of its most in- 
tensely national centres, been cut out of its very trunk. 
For deliberate violation of national right this case stands, 
therefore, alone in the history of the nineteenth century, 
or paralleled only in the case of Poland. It is not the cession 
of a province, but the dismemberment of a nation. It is 
annexation on a scale and of a character unexampled in 
more modern times. To find its parallel we must go back 
to other centuries. 

Be it observed that the sentiment of nationality is the 
birth of recent times ; sprung, in fact, from the Revolution. 
In the old days of dynastic wars nations in our sense hardly 
existed, or existed only in England and France. The prin- 
cipal kingdoms consisted of bundles of duchies, fiefs, and 
principalities, with little sense of national coherence. To 
transfer them from one sovereign to another may have 
weakened the power of the ruler, yet it was but a small shock 
to the feelings of the population transferred, and hardly 
any to the other lieges of the sovereign to whom they ceased 
to belong. Cession of provinces, as the result of war, was 
then a dynastic and feudal question, and may have had 
some reason; for national rights hardly existed. One Ger- 



52 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

man savant, in that spirit of grotesque chicanery which 
this war has developed in that ingenious body, has told us 
that it is quite immoral to end a war without cession of terri- 
tory. Others have deluged us from their note-books with 
instances from the history of the House of Capet or the 
House of Hapsburg. Antiquarian rubbish ! The intense 
spirit of nationality has revolutionised these matters entirely. 
It is but of recent birth, but it is now one of the prime movers 
of the European system. Guai a chi la tocca. Barbarossa 
may indeed awake, but if he venture to recast Europe with 
the mediaeval notions with which he went down into his 
tomb, more especially if he attempt it in France, democ- 
ratised and nationalised, and in the enthusiasm of a new 
Republican spirit, this weird phantom of a dead past will 
be plunging the nations of our time into a new era of revo- 
lution and war. 

A very eminent historian has lately put forward a defence 
for this and other acts of the Prussian monarchy, by com- 
paring it with what was done by Plantagenet or Tudor kings 
in England, and by the House of Capet in France. One 
would think it was only necessary to be an historian, to set 
aside the principles on which modern nations depend for 
their existence. Why, the very charge against the Prussian 
dynasty and its advisers is, that they are carrying into modern 
policy those violent and unjust practices of old times, which 
it is the function of modern civilisation to repudiate and to 
repress. They are simply Tudors and Capets in the nine- 
teenth century; and that is what the nineteenth century 
will never endure. The attempt to repeat the process by 
which dynasties of old formed nations is the worst of all 
offences now against the rights and peace of nations. It 
is precisely because the Prussian monarch belongs to an era 
and a caste which has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 53 

that he is outraging the conscience of modern Europe, and 
perpetrating a wrong against nations, more fatal than any 
other since the revolutionary wars, and against which the 
modern world must remain in permanent insurrection. 

Let us now consider the position of England at the close 
of this war. France, from the necessity of the case, will be 
so much exhausted and humiliated, that independent action 
in Europe would be in any case impossible to her. But 
that she is feeble will be the least part of the case. She 
will be so completely at the mercy of Germany, that for the 
present she must cease to count as one of the great Powers. 
When diplomacy has finished the work of war, she will not 
dare to profess a policy contrary to that of Prussia. She 
will not be in the position of Russia at the close of the Cri- 
mean War, exhausted, but powerful and independent. She 
will be like Poland after the first partition, or like Piedmont 
after Novara, at the mercy of an enemy who can march at 
any moment on her defenceless capital. She must, therefore, 
for any practical purpose, retire from the councils of Europe, 
or enter them, as now, for the purpose only of making her 
indignation heard, of fomenting discord, or of grasping at 
any ally at almost any price. 1 

The problem that English statesmen have to face is, how 
to maintain our position in Europe when France has ceased 
to be an element in the question. Let them look back for 
one or two generations, and weigh the importance of those 
interests in which England and France were as one. Ever 
since the days of the Holy Alliance, and the recovery from 
the great spasm of the Revolutionary war, no fact in the 
history of Europe has been more marked than the growing 

1 This imminent danger was averted, first, by the extraordinary power 
of recuperation by France, a power which astonished and alarmed Bismarck, 
and next, by the strange alliance with Russia — even less to be foreseen — 
an alliance which had the tacit approval of England (1908). 



54 



NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 



tendency towards union in the policy of France and England. 
In spite of dynastic or ministerial intrigues, gradually for 
forty years it has been growing more clear that in France 
and in England the weight of the popular feeling marched 
onwards in parallel lines, and that France and England 
stood out as the guarantees in the long run for progress and 
for right. England and France were felt by all to be great 
powers, second to none in material strength; the one sup- 
posed to be supreme by sea and the other by land, whilst 
they were the only states in Europe where the liberal feeling 
of the nation had strength to prevent their respective Gov- 
ernments from long continuing on the wrong side. 

During the last generation there have been four great 
questions of European importance. In all of these France 
and England, in the main, had a common purpose. In the 
question of Turkey and the East, disfigured as their action 
was by private jealousies, they at least concurred in this: 
both England and France were opposed to the absorption 
of Turkey in the Muscovite empire, and both favoured the 
status quo in the East as the least disturbing issue possible. 
In the key of the English policy, the French on the whole 
agreed — that the Eastern Mediterranean should not be- 
come the prey either of anarchy or of the Czar. During 
the Crimean War that alliance was deepened and confirmed ; 
and since the taking of Sebastopol there has grown up a 
tacit acknowledgment, too often not justified by facts, that 
in the long run England and France were the representatives 
of the cause of national independence, in the Mediterranean 
as well as in the Baltic. 

The case of Poland came next. And to whom did Poland 
look in spite of repeated disappointment — to whom could 
she look — but to England and to France? There again 
the policy of our two nations, emphatically of both peoples, 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 55 

and mainly of both Governments, has worked together. 
And though on no single occasion has the Government of 
both agreed on any common plan of active intervention, 
their assistance has not been wholly in vain; and their 
moral support has enabled the Poles to maintain their 
national traditions under all the tyranny of the Eastern 
despotisms. 

Throughout the whole of this period there existed the 
Italian question; and here again, in spite of the insincere 
policy of Napoleon, the French and the English people 
heartily concurred. With the ruler of France, and sections 
of Frenchmen, selfish interests held the foremost place; 
but no one can doubt that it was by the persistent support 
which the French and the English nation gave to the prin- 
ciples of national right, that Italy has at length regained her 
independence. 

Then came the Danish war, the first beginning of that 
career of aggression which is now triumphing in France. 
Here again the French people and the English were entirely 
as one. And though the French ministry, but lately re- 
buffed on the Polish question, declined (as we now know) to 
join the English in active operations, the mere fact of a pro- 
posal of the kind having passed between them, is a proof 
how closely the two countries felt the cause of independence 
to be violated by the attempt to partition Denmark, ana 
how much their joint support contributed to save her from 
utter extinction. 

In the East the fleets and armies of France and England 
have acted even more directly in concert. But I abstain 
from making any use of the arguments to be found in the 
support which England has received from France in Asia. 
In neither case do I believe the interference to have been 
for the good of civilisation, though perhaps it was rendered 



56 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

less injurious to it by the presence of two rival nations in 
concert. I freely admit that there have been many ques- 
tions in which the French nation has been opposed to the 
English, and still more frequently their Government to ours. 
It is sufficient to point out that in the four principal questions 
which have deeply stirred Europe within this generation, 
the French nation had joint interests and sympathies with 
our own, and were actuated by the same principles to follow 
a common policy. 

Even when, as is too true, the wretched Government of 
Napoleon, and at times the French people, engaged in or 
tended towards a course fatal to progress and peace, and 
hostile to our common traditions, the English policy and 
public opinion have been able to modify and control those 
of France by virtue of the sense of our many common inter- 
ests. In the Italian question, in the American Civil War, 
in the Danubian questions, in the Mexican interference, 
and even in the Luxemburg difficulty in 1867, where the 
miserable ambition of the Imperial dynasty was embarked 
on a retrograde course, the moral strength of England has 
exercised a most salutary control, and gained an ultimate 
ascendancy for right, by virtue of its being felt by the French 
people to represent the voice of an honest and genuine 
friend. Looking at it broadly, as national policy alone can 
be looked at, and seeking only for what is fundamental, a 
fair mind will allow that the co-operation of France with 
England has been a solid and a great fact ; that the alliance 
has been on the whole a real thing, and an alliance in the 
main for good. 

It is all over now ; and where are we to find its like ? On 
all these four typical questions of European policy, whilst 
France at heart was with us and with the right, Prussia, 
the new mistress of Europe, was against us and with the 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 57 

wrong. In the Crimean War she threw her undisguised 
sympathies and her secret influence on the side of Musco- 
vite aggression. In the Polish question she played into the 
hands of the oppressors, for is she not one of the standing 
oppressors herself? In the Italian question she joined her 
cause with Austria, and declared for the permanent enslave- 
ment of Italy by German bayonets. Nay, more, in 1859, 
she declared Venetia a strategic question for Germany, 
though for her own ends, in 1866, she found means to sur- 
render it. Of the Danish question it is needless to speak, 
for she was the author and head of that wanton spoliation. 
On all these great questions, in which England stood forth 
with France as the guardian of right and respect for nations, 
she will find herself now face to face with that gigantic Des- 
potism which is the very embodiment of the wrong; and 
she will find herself before that Power — alone. 1 

Condemn, as we may, the national faults of France, 
denounce, as we please, their pretension to supremacy in 
Europe (a pretension exactly equivalent to that which Eng- 
land makes to maritime supremacy), we must still feel that 
in no other nation does there exist a public opinion so akin 
to our own, and at the same time so completely in the ascend- 
ant. The heart of the great French nation beats with that 
of our own, and we feel its pulsations in every workshop 
and every cottage of the land. The true modern life breathes 
in both of us equally: the same generous sympathies, the 
same faith in progress, the like yearning for a social regenera- 
tion of the West. And France, we feel, has been truly passed 
through the revolution: the social rule of caste, the dead- 
weight of feudal institutions, the organised reaction, has 



1 Happily, in the present reign things are changed. The fears of 1871 
are modified — not extinct — in 1908. The doubtful hopes of 1871 are 
almost now real facts (1908). 



58 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

passed away from them, far more than from us, and certainly 
far more than from any other people in Europe. Anarchy 
and tyranny in turn afflict them for a season ; but we know 
that in France the reign of neither can be long. We feel 
that in spite of repeated failures and errors, and the mis- 
deeds of rulers, there still lives the great French people, 
animated by noble ideas, the slaves of no caste and of no 
system, who in the long run are always, and are worthy to 
be, the masters of the destinies of France. 

It is so now, and it has been so in the past. The true 
history of France, seen in the light of a broad survey of the 
annals of mankind, is the history of a nation which has been 
in the van of progress. She who led Europe in the Crusades 
to resist the aggression of the Saracen; she who built up 
the great central monarchy in Europe out of feudal chaos, 
and inaugurated the institutions of modern government 
out of the antique armoury of chivalry ; she who kept at 
bay the bigotry and tyranny which once menaced Europe 
from Hapsburg ambition, rose out of a century and a half 
of restless thought and evil policy into the Revolution, which, 
with all its crimes, was the new birth of modern society. 
In the true philosophy of history, it is France who (often 
backsliding, and often the enemy of right) has been in the 
main foremost in the cause of civilisation. Let us leave it 
to half-crazy pedants to represent her as the evil destiny of 
nations. Men who have grown purblind and anti-social 
whilst working deep down in the stifling mines of German 
records, see the good spirit of mankind in the wild and val- 
orous doings of panoplied Rittmeisters ; of the Grafs and 
Kaisers who prolonged the Middle Ages down into the six- 
teenth or the seventeenth century. The good sense of 
mankind has long agreed that the great French nation holds 
a precious part in the history of civilisation; a part which 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 



59 



she held of old, and holds still : her place no other can 
supply. 1 

We need not thereby deny the great and noble qualities 
of other races in Europe, much less of the massive and ener- 
getic German people. But the good sense of Englishmen 
is agreed that nowhere (for America distinctly stands aloof 
from Continental questions) do they find, as they do in the 
French, a people combining the same sympathies and inter- 
ests as their own, with so high a power of giving them effect. 
How can the new German Empire supply that place ? How 
can the free and peaceful policy of England look for its 
right hand to the Prussian dynasty and its military chiefs? 
The Hohenzollern monarchy has traditions more unchanged 
and rooted than any house in Europe. They are traditions 
of national aggrandisement, of military power, of royal 
prerogative, and divine right. It represents, and is proud 
of representing, the despotic, warlike, retrograde forces of 
Europe. The key of its policy has been common cause 
with Russia. Its aim has been to broaden the foundations 
of its own ascendancy. Not a single liberal movement in 
Europe has ever found in it a friend; not one service to 
civilisation or to peace can it boast. Its great pride has been 
that, alone of the five great Powers, it has upheld unbending 
the old royalty and chivalry as it existed before the Revolu- 
tion. Such is the Power with which the Parliamentary 
Ministers of this free English nation are to form their future 
alliances, or to whose will they are to bow in submission. 
The sacred Ministers of "happy England" do not lift up 
the eyes to dream of an alliance with the successor of Bar- 
barossa; but they are offering him their homage at Ver- 



1 It has needed more than thirty years for English statesmen thoroughly 
to realise this. Events in the late decade have forced it on them (1908). 



60 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

sailles, as if the House of Guelf were one of the mediatised 
princes. 1 

Optimists, with a tincture of German literature, are fond 
of assuring us that however little hope civilisation can find 
in the Hohenzollern dynasty, the great German people will 
set all right in their own good time. Far be it from us to 
deny the admirable qualities of the German people, more 
especially their high cultivation of all sorts, and their splen- 
did intellectual gifts. Professors, with a nai've enthusiasm, 
rehearse the tale of Teutonic literature, science, and art; 
grow maudlin over the domestic virtues of the German home ; 
and celebrate it as the nursery of the best of fathers and 
the truest of friends. Well and good ; but the question is, 
what has the Prussian dynasty done for the peace of Europe ? 
A race may have the highest intellectual and personal gifts, 
and yet not as a nation have consciously assumed any great 
international function. After all, the value of a nation in 
the common councils depends on its social forces, on its 
consciousness of public duties, rather than on its intellectual 
brilliancy. In their later ages the Greeks, with their match- 
less mental gifts, were of almost no account as a nation; 
whilst the Romans, in cultivation far their inferiors, were 
foremost by the ascendancy of their national genius. The 
real strength of a nation, especially in these days, consists 
not in its achievements in science or art, but in the degree 
to which its national will can command the sympathies and 
give shape to the wants of the age. This is now the only 
claim which a nation can possess to the supremacy amongst 
nations. And it is this which Germany is yet too inorganic, 
too much encumbered with the debris of the past, and too 
little conscious of national duty, reasonably to assert. 

Worthy and enlightened souls as the good German burgh- 

1 We sing a very different song to-day (1908). 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 6 1 

ers are in many relations of life, socially and politically they 
are what we in the West of Europe, or what Americans, 
call, decidedly backward. They have a wonderful army, 
a consummate administration, a high-pressure educational 
machinery, an omniscient press, and a number of other sur- 
prising social productions, but, with all that, they have not 
the true political genius. They still live under a grotesque 
medley of antiquated princelets, who are not, like our mon- 
archy and aristocracy, modernised into the mere heads of 
society, but are living remnants of feudal chieftainship. 
The rule of these princes still rests on divine right, on vassal 
devotion, and military subordination. It is buttressed round 
by the serried ranks of a social hierarchy, also feudal in its 
pretensions and in its strength, not like our own, modernised 
and transformed to the uses of a democratic society, but 
standing in all the naked antiquity of its preposterous pride. 
Society, therefore, in Germany, is heavily oppressed by the 
superincumbent mass of strata upon strata of old-world 
orders and venerable institutions, habits, and ideas, of which 
a great free and progressive people, as we here understand 
it, would never endure the weight. 

There is, therefore, in Prussia no true public opinion. 
Politics are discussed with unfathomable profundity, and 
the press peers into public affairs with well-regulated curi- 
osity; but for true influence on the policy of Prussia the 
people of Prussia count nothing. An eminent encomiast 
of the German Empire has but recently acknowledged that, 
great as the proportions of the new edifice will prove, it will 
still want some of the modern improvements of the state 
fabric. It will not be (of course) a constitutional affair, 
it is not intended to be a parliamentary government, there 
is no idea of having ministerial responsibility, or of public 
opinion controlling the army or the finances of the state. 



62 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

For my part I am not enamoured of our present form of 
parliamentary government ; but I do maintain that a govern- 
ment which is in no sense to be the organ of public opinion, 
is not a free and not a progressive government. The Prus- 
sian regime is not one which has passed beyond a parlia- 
mentary system, but one which has never reached it. It 
looks upon the voice of the nation as Tudors or Stuarts 
looked at it, as something which may offer respectful com- 
ments, but is never to exercise control. This is the ideal 
of government which accords with every tradition of the 
house of Hohenzollern, which is maintained by the yet un- 
shaken strength of a social system pledged to defend it by 
pride as much as by interest, which the middle-class Prussian 
accepts by every habit of his nature, and worships with 
instinctive idolatry. It will be a revolution only that can 
shake it. 

But the true character of this Hohenzollern dynasty is 
determined by that "peculiar institution" of Prussia, the 
Junker class. It is a phenomenon to which no parallel 
exists in Europe, a genuine aristocratic military caste. It 
is not like our own aristocracy, rich, peaceful, and half- 
bourgeois. It is not like the French Imperial army, a mere 
staff of officers, with no local or social influence. It is not like 
the Spanish order of Grandees, an effete body of incapables. 
It is an order of men knit together by all the ties of family 
pride and interest; with an historic social influence; with 
a high education, and a strong nature of a special sort ; rich 
enough to have local power both in town and country; and 
yet so poor as to depend for existence on the throne — and 
with all this, devoted passionately, necessarily, to war. It 
is a caste, which an aspiring dynasty has moulded out of 
the Ritters and Grafs of mediaeval Germany. The Williams 
and Fredericks, with their strong hand, have taken the fierce 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 63 

old lanzknecht and his children, given him a scanty manor 
and a soldier's pension, drilled him into the best soldier in 
the world, tutored him in the absolute science of destruction, 
given him two watchwords — "King" and "God" — and 
kept him for every other purpose a simple mediaeval knight. 
He is now the ideal of the scientific soldier, always a gallant, 
often a cultivated man, but in this industrial and progressive 
age, an anachronism. Scratch the Junker, and you will 
find the lanzknecht. We have nothing to compare with 
him, though he reminds one a little of the Rajpoot caste 
in Oude, or the Japanese Daimio and his Ronins. The 
last time these islands saw his like, was when Charles Ed- 
ward led his Highland chieftains on their raid. The differ- 
ence is, that the Junker is a social and political power, civ- 
ilised in all the material sides to the last point of modern 
science. Morally and socially, in all that we look for in 
peace and progress, he is as abnormal and foreign an 
element as if Fergus Mclvor were amongst us with his 
claymore. 

It was the fashion (not unnaturally) to treat this order as 
of small political account. But they have now thrown up 
their man of genius, they are the true masters of the situa- 
tion, and they have embarked their King on a new career, 
in which he will be unable to stop. Count Bismarck has 
found how this caste may make itself a necessity for the 
nation, how it can step forward as the right arm to work out 
the national dream, and in the name of Nationality and 
Peace may found a new military supremacy. He has done 
with profounder craft what Napoleon did at the close of the 
last century, and has debauched the spirit of patriotic de- 
fence into a thirst for glory and domination. Who thought 
in 1792 that the acclaims of Frenchmen for universal philan- 
thropy (more passionate and real than those of German 



64 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

eruditi in 1870) were destined to glide, step by step, into the 
sanguinary vanity of the Napoleonic wars? At every move 
in the game of ambition, the self-love of the people and the 
degradation of the army grew with an equal growth. Like 
Napoleon, Bismarck must go on, feeding an Empire of 
military supremacy by fresh pretensions. 

The situation is so unreal that it must be sustained by 
further crimes. The Empire, threatened already by the 
people, must rest on the vast soldier caste ; to reward and 
stimulate that soldier caste, fresh aliment must be found 
for its soldier pride. Russia, Austria, France, must some 
day look askance, even if our merchants still smirk before 
the new Empire, with a tradesman's bow. To maintain 
an attitude founded upon wrong, fresh wrongs must be ven- 
tured. The weight of the new Despotism, threatened from its 
birth both at home and abroad, must tell on the deluded Ger- 
man people. And to repress their opposition, their national 
vanity must be fed with fresh stimulants, or their efforts 
swallowed up in a new convulsion. Bismarck plays with 
Fatherland to the German burgher, as Napoleon I. played 
the Coalition to the bourgeois of France, or Napoleon III. 
the Spectre Rouge. As to the chiefs of the German army, 
and its whole officer class, war is their profession, and their 
social monopoly. They no more desire peace than the 
lawyer desires to close courts of justice, or the Roman patri- 
cian desired to close the Temple of Janus. A military 
Empire now has but one career to run — that of Napoleon 
I. — that of Napoleon III. Those states who take the 
sword for their title, must perish by the sword. 

The new Empire of Germany is thus, in its origin, a menace 
to Europe. The house of Hohenzollern, with its traditions 
of aggrandisement, with its consummate bureaucratic ma- 
chinery, and its bodyguard of a warlike caste, can never be 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 65 

the titular chief of peaceful industrial German kingdoms. 
It is no case of chance personal despotism, or mushroom 
revolutionary adventurer. It is a great power, whose roots 
go deep into every pore of the two upper classes of German 
society. It is arbitrary, military, fanatical. In one word, 
it is the enemy of modern progress. Though not repre- 
senting the German people, it has debauched and masters 
the German people. Six months of this gigantic war have 
turned the flower of the German citizens into professional 
troopers. The very fact that they have as a nation submitted 
to the military yoke, the fact that every German is a soldier, 
is itself a proof of a lower type of civilisation, and marks 
them as a nation capable of becoming a curse to their neigh- 
bours. 

It is not necessary to suppose that this new power has any 
distinct vision of further conquests, or universal dominion. 
It is quite sufficient calamity to Europe that such a power 
should possess paramount supremacy. It may be the good 
German souls are right, and that neither they nor the Em- 
pire, which is another thing, mean any harm. But why 
are the nations to depend for existence on the forbearance 
of their mighty neighbour? And if we are safe, are all the 
smaller states safe ? The one thing which is now the dream 
of the North German is a great navy and power at sea. 1 
To this end the very friends of Prussia admit that Continental 
Denmark is necessary for her. The inevitable result of 
such a career as that of Prussia is, that she must seek to be 
the mistress of the Baltic. She will begin by coercing, and 
end by absorbing all who stand in her way. As to Holland, 
every step in affairs brings her nearer and nearer to the 
inevitable fate. And England will yet come to see that she 

1 This forecast of 1871 has a very different meaning in 1908. In 1871 
the German navy was a quantite negln 

F 



66 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

must stand alone to defend the existence, to guarantee the 
independence of those industrious, friendly kingdoms along 
the northern seas, or consent to see them made the instru- 
ments of a new and far nearer Russia. 

In the centre and South of Europe, Prussia, if this war 
close with her undisputed triumph, can arrange everything 
at her own good pleasure. The question of the Danube, 
the very existence of Turkey, 1 hang upon her favour, and 
will be determined by her interests. For as the first-fruits 
of the new supremacy, Austria, who at first was calling out 
for English support, is for very life drawing near in obse- 
quious deference to the conqueror. Italy may at any mo- 
ment be ordered to restore or to satisfy the Pope. And 
Switzerland finds herself surrounded by a new danger. 
With a power so tremendous, and an ambition so ruthless, 
as that which Prussia has exhibited, everything is possible, 
and every nation is unsafe. But the matter for us is not so 
much whether Prussia will overrun Europe, or swallow up 
this or that smaller nation. All that is for the future; but 
what is in the present, our actual calamity, is this: the 
greatest shock of this century has been given to the principle 
of national rights; the black flag of conquest has been 
unfurled by a dominant power ; one nation has gained a su- 
premacy in arms which puts the security of every other at 
her sufferance, and that a nation directed by a policy against 
which every free people is in permanent revolt. 

Such is the result which an English Government has 
watched gathering up for six months, now with, an air of 
Pharisaical neutrality, now with a flood of pulpit good ad- 
vice. European politics form a world in which the forces 
are tremendous. To cope with them are needed great 

1 The Sultan has long found the German Empire his best — his only 
friend. Thus secured, he has a free hand in crime (1908). 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 67 

insight and resolute natures, and not fluent tongues. States- 
men need something to deal with them more solid than pretty 
essays ; they can be touched only by deeds, and not by words. 
No nation can stand apart, gaping on in maudlin hymns to 
its own exceeding good fortune, or pouring out its eloquent 
laments over the naughtiness of its neighbours. If the 
foundation of a great military empire, overshadowing all 
Europe, be in truth a good thing, let us make it the new 
basis of our foreign policy, and not crawl like mere courtiers 
to the conqueror's footstool. But if it be a bad thing, and 
a danger to us and to the common peace, by all the traditions 
of the British race let us throw our whole force to prevent 
its triumph. Act ; for act you must ; to stand still is to be 
on its side. Act with your moral force, if you please, since 
we are told that England has no physical force left; act 
even with your moral force, for that may yet be something. 
Have a policy, declare it, and act on it. 

It is impossible to be morally neutral. If you mean well 
to the conqueror, stand up and preach sermons upon peace ; 
for that is to truckle to the stronger. If you do not see his 
triumph with delight, you must show him so with something 
stronger than affectionate remonstrance or copy-book ex- 
hortations to keep the Ten Commandments. Nations in 
this wicked world are seldom amenable to moral lectures, 
and a nation flushed with glory and ambition can be touched 
by nothing but the fear of retribution. When England 
stands by, and sees, without moving, the whole face of Eu- 
rope transformed and a new principle enthroned amongst 
nations, she is virtually its accomplice. A great nation, 
in spite of itself, must play a part. It cannot stand by, 
like a field-preacher, at a street-fight, crying out with benevo- 
lent imbecility, — "My friends, keep clear of those wicked 
men! Wicked men, shake hands and be friends!" To 



68 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

offer good counsels to Prussia is to become her plaything; 
or her parasite. You might as well throw tracts and hymn- 
books at a tiger. 

"What can we do?" cries that cynical No-Policy with 
which the governing classes have contrived to gild and to 
satisfy the gross selfishness of the trader. "What!" sneers 
the organ of the money-dealers, "are we for the balance of 
power and intervention in this latter half of the nineteenth 
century?" If to have national interests and duties, and to 
act for the maintenance of those interests, and in defence of 
rights, if this be intervention, it has not yet ceased to be the 
policy of this country, and let us trust it never will. England 
has continually intervened when it seemed to be her interest 
and her right. She intervened in 1854 to protect Turkey 
from absorption; she is intervening at this moment for the 
same end; she intervened but the other day to preserve 
Belgium. She intervened persistently and effectively against 
the retrograde oppression of the old Austrian empire. Her 
policy in Asia is one perpetual and restless intervention. 
As to the balance of power, if the pedantic and jealous ad- 
herence to the status quo was a source of danger and of wrong, 
which the good sense of our time has rejected, there is a 
sense in which it is an invaluable safeguard against the pre- 
ponderance of power. 

It is true still, that it will be a dark day for Europe when 
any one Power shall hold the rest in the hollow of its mailed 
hand. If it was a menace to Europe when the House of 
Hapsburg or of Capet threatened to absorb half Europe, 
if it was an European calamity when Napoleon ruled from 
Berlin to Madrid, so it will be the knell of peace and liberty 
when the triumphant Empire of Germany bestrides the 
Continent without an equal. If it succeed in doing so it 
will be the act of England, who stands by, trading and ser- 



THE DUTY OF ENGLAND 69 

monising, selling arms but using none, "bellum caupo- 
nantes, non belligerantes," droning out homilies and betray- 
ing every duty of a nation. It will be the crowning proof 
of the degradation of those governing orders who have bought 
power by subservience to the traders, and surrendered the 
traditions of their ancestors; that they who can make war 
at the bidding of a knot of merchants, and call Europe into 
conference for some supposed commercial interest, have 
nothing in this, the greatest revolution in the state system 
of modern Europe, but a policy of absolute abnegation; 
a policy which thoughtful politicians know to be suicidal, 
and the mass of the people feel to be shameful; the policy 
which the new Emperor of the West told them with a gibe, 
as they came bowing to his court, was the only policy that 
remained for them — the policy of eff acement. 

January 17, 1871. 



Ill 

FRANCE AFTER WAR 

(June 1874) 

The following Essay was written in May 1874, an ^ was 
published in the Fortnightly Review of that year (vol. 
xv.). At the time the whole of the milliards (£200,- 
000,000) had been paid by France, and her territory evacu- 
ated by Germany. A fierce struggle under the "Mar- 
shalate" was being carried on by De Broglie and the 
Bonapartists against the Republicans, led by Thiers 
and Gambetta. The political parties and the National 
Assembly were torn by monarchist and imperialist in- 
trigues, and the existence of the Republican form 
hung doubtfully on the divisions of the reactionary sec- 
tions. In the meantime the German chiefs were contem- 
plating a fresh invasion, which became imminent in 
the following year, 1875. The peril of the Republic, 
and even of France, was extreme (igo8). 

Manifold and subtle are the theories propounded to 
account for the evils which have fallen upon France. It is 
a subject to exercise our powers of invention, and to gratify 
our sense of morality ; so that every man has an explanation 
of his own, which differs with his politics, his habits, or his 
creed. Democracy, despotism, Dumas, pilgrimages, Vol- 
taire, absinthe, Malthus, or bals-masques are the theories 
chiefly in favour. Yet there is, one would think, an explana- 

70 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 7 1 

tion before our eyes quite as simple, and far more complete. 
If we miss it, it is only because it is too familiar to us, so 
manifest that we are apt to forget its presence — that it 
towers above like a mountain, whilst we are staring at the 
foreground. That grand cause of all is simply the Revolu- 
tion, still in the course of its long agony. Often as it happens 
that we cannot see the wood for the trees, it was never more 
so than when things which are but the undergrowth of the 
Revolution prevent us from seeing the Revolution itself. 

Rightly to judge the condition of France, the first thing 
is to recognise that she is still in the crisis of organic revolu- 
tion. It is too late to moralise or complain over this obvious 
fact. We might as well reproach our first parents with the 
Fall of man. And it is idle to inveigh against evils which 
are the inevitable results of the revolutionary state, when we 
have made up our minds that the Revolution itself must be 
accepted. It was an unlucky piece of hypercriticism in a 
great master of logic when he said that the term revolution 
meant nothing definite or real. The Revolution, at any 
rate in France, is the most real fact of our age. The Revo- 
lution is the change from the feudal to the industrial 
phase of society, from the aristocratic to the republican 
form of government, from the Church and terrorism to good 
sense and humanity. It is transforming at once ideas, 
habits, institutions, nations, and societies. Under it the 
national sentiment is taking a new departure, partly widen- 
ing into that of the great community of the people, partly 
intensifying itself in the form of local republicanism. 

Under the same influence the struggle of the people for 
political and social emancipation makes everything spas- 
modic and provisional. When we see constitution after 
constitution torn to pieces in France, it is simply that the 
Revolution has left the great fight of classes still undecided. 



72 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

If anarchical insurrections are succeeded by murderous 
tyrannies, it is the Revolution raging in the death-grapple 
of two types of society. If Government seems paralysed 
and dissolved into a Babel of changing impulses, it is simply 
the ebb and flow of the revolutionary battle. The cross- 
purpose, the dead-lock, the ceaseless repetition, the round- 
and-round restlessness of politics in France, are nothing but 
the sway of parties in this secular contest. To complain of 
it is as idle as to complain of the smoke and of the dead and 
dying in a battle. There stand face to face two great prin- 
ciples, which all modern history has been preparing; it is 
a struggle in which all nations are more or less sharing, but 
which in its acutest form is concentrated in France ; it is a 
struggle which cannot be fought out either soon or gently, 
for it claims generations of men, infinite destruction, suffer- 
ing, and death. On this issue hang the most momentous 
consequences for evil and for good, for France and for Eu- 
rope; and its effects are so grand and so inevitable that it 
is useless to dilate upon the trivialities, the confusions, the 
corruptions, the follies, the helplessness, which are but its 
symptoms and concomitants. 

The great war and the great overthrow which we have 
lately witnessed in France are but an episode in the greater 
civil war. France marched upon the Rhine in the mere 
delirium of civil war; she lies prostrate before Germany 
in the exhaustion of civil war, because civil war had almost 
dissolved her as a nation. Parties and classes within her 
hate and fear each other more than the invader. National 
spirit has been broken, because the national sentiment itself 
has been made a new weapon of civil war. Religion is used 
as a means of party victory, and, in the language of the day, 
the Bon Dieu has become a deputy, and sits on the Extreme 
Right. So far from its being matter of wonder that France 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 73 

should be weak, divided, and restless, it would be wonderful 
if she were not. The real wonder is that she exists as a 
nation at all, and that her political mechanism still works 
as a whole in the midst of these social battles. Nations 
engaged in civil war are always distracted and changeful, 
and usually a prey to their neighbours; and it is so far to 
the credit of the French people that they are carrying on 
their social war without actual fighting or material anarchy. 

The nations of Europe, who from the comparative calm 
of their national unity point the finger of scorn at France, 
should at least remember that the evils which she endures 
have an origin in European even more than in French causes. 
That is to say, the problems which her people have to solve, 
the social war which she is battling through, and the des- 
perate parties and principles within her, are common to all 
parts of civilised Europe, and are fed by European resources. 
For various reasons these great social crises are brought to 
their acutest and earliest phases in France. But the issues 
are being fought out for Europe, and are envenomed and 
protracted by European entanglements. France is the first 
of the great nations of Europe which has resolutely faced and 
all but solved the crucial problem involved in passing from 
the feudal to the republican society. She is the first which 
has set herself avowedly to cast off the old skin of Catholic 
hypocrisy. And she is the first which has taken as her 
political basis the social recognition of the mass of the people. 
These three problems, complex as they are, might have been 
settled by France long ago had she stood alone. The ob- 
stinacy of the contest is promoted by the moral and often 
the material interference of forces in the rest of Europe. 

France by herself had long ago silenced the remnants of 
the monarchical and the feudal factions ; but they keep the 
field by the immense moral support which they receive from 



74 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the consolidated forces of monarchy and feudalism still 
dominant in Europe. By herself, France would long ago 
have reduced her ultramontane Catholics to a powerless 
sect, were it not that Europe and the world still arm them 
with fanatical fury against her. Thus also alone she would 
have settled the task of the social incorporation of the people, 
were it not that her privileged and propertied classes fight 
with the desperation of an advanced guard, which sees itself 
supported and encouraged by the unbroken ranks of the 
privileged in other countries around them. Were France 
transported bodily to the other side of the Atlantic, it would 
be short work with monarchy, feudality, church, and privi- 
lege. She suffers and heaves, and is torn in pieces by her 
own children as by strangers, because she has flung herself 
first into a movement for which Europe is not ready, but 
where Europe yet must follow her; and as she struggles 
onward towards a new and more human social order, she 
has to make head against the feudalisms and the sacerdo- 
talisms of Europe, against the class-passions, the bigotry, 
the valetdom, the clericdom of the world. 

In this great revolution the last few years have witnessed 
the most extraordinary change. The deepest political fact 
of our time, the most critical of the last two generations, is 
the fact that since the fall of the empire the mass of the French 
peasantry have definitely ranged themselves on the side of 
the republic. Now, the French peasantry are the great 
majority of French citizens ; the territorial system has freed 
them from all local dictation, and the political system has 
made them feel independence and power. The mass of the 
French peasantry, in the material sense, are France; and 
they know it. They were the bone and blood of the up- 
rising of '93 ; they filled the armies which threw back the 
kings, and followed them over every country of Europe; 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 



75 



they decreed the revival of the empire in 1852 ; and they 
bore the suffering and the slaughter of the invasion of 1870. 
They are not an heroic, not a brilliant, not a generous order. 
They have neither the genius nor the magnanimity, and 
happily none of the fury, which have often fired the Paris 
workmen. Their virtues are of a soberer, duller kind; 
they are patient, enduring, cautious, frugal, critical. They 
are very tough, very slow to persuade, very suspicious of 
the new, full of worldly wisdom, and as obstinate as over- 
driven mules; and from their numbers, their homogeneity, 
their impassibility, they are very strong, and feel that they 
are very strong. Who that has ever watched the canny 
Norman peasant on his patrimony, has failed to read the 
unlimited caution, grit, and patience of the man? Who 
that has ever studied the French peasant's fireside, the fire- 
side of Sand and Hugo, of Millet and of Frere, has failed 
to perceive that, narrow, dull, and penurious as it might 
be, it is the home of a citizen — of a citizen who has no 
master? That man will ponder slowly over things, doubt, 
suspect, and think mainly of himself. He will often be 
wrong, unjust, and selfish; but when he gives his vote, he 
will give it as a man who intends to make it good, and knows 
that he can make it good. 

For generations now he has looked upon the town citizen 
as his principal enemy, as a man whose atheism is needlessly 
obtrusive, and whose socialism is an unpardonable sin. 
For generations his political life has aimed at restraining 
the town workman; and for him the town workman has 
been embodied in the republic. Hence, he gave France 
the first empire, and in our day the second empire. But 
a great change has come over him, in its own way perhaps 
the greatest change of this century. For the first time in 
modern French history the peasant and the town workman 



76 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

have been brought together into line. Widely as they differ 
in their view of its form, though the one means a conservative 
bourgeoisie, scarcely differing from the English monarchy, 
and the other a democratic dictatorship, both peasant and 
workman are at one in demanding the republic. Nor is it a 
mere toleration of the republic that the peasant is prepared 
for: it is a settled conviction and instinct. 

To him the republic is now the conservative, safe, and 
moderate institution ; it is identified with property ; it repre- 
sents order, it gives a dignity to the country without, and 
puts an end to civil war within. The parties which seem 
to him to rage against the republic are they who breathe 
anarchy and confiscation. Horrid rumours of ancient feu- 
dalisms have run round, and the quiet useful cure is seen 
to swell with sacerdotal pretensions, and to meditate strange 
revivals. All this has shocked and terrified the peasant, 
till at last he has come to think of Church and Throne with 
that kind of hate and fear with which the Scotch peasant 
under the Stuarts thought of episcopacy. He has awakened 
from his dream of the Red Spectre, which was his bugbear 
of old. If he is troubled now with spectres, it is with the 
tales of a Black Spectre of the dimes, and the White Spectre 
of the corvees. 

During the six months of war nearly a million of men 
held arms, and hardly a home in France but was thus asso- 
ciated with the struggle. And every man knew that he 
was fighting for the republic. The republic was France; 
it alone was clear of the guilt of the original disasters; the 
only gleams of success had been won by the republic; the 
only captains who gained high reputations — the Faid- 
herbes, the Chanzys, and the Denferts — were known or 
thought to be republicans. In the storm of disasters, in the 
agony of final surrender, and in the last humiliation of the 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 77 

cession, men's minds would turn to the image of their coun- 
try, — and the symbol of their country was always the 
republic. Tremendous sufferings and defeat can bind men 
sometimes together as closely as illustrious victories, and 
sometimes even more closely. 

To the old soldier of the empire it was a memory more 
sacred and binding to have been with the Emperor at Water- 
loo than to have been beside him at Austerlitz. The legend 
of the martyrdom of Waterloo bore its fruit in the second 
empire, and the men who condoned the crime of December 
were the sons and grandsons of the men who had been dragged 
to bleed in the death-struggle of the last years of the empire, 
who perished in Spain, Germany, or Belgium, who died on 
the march from Moscow or in the bloody fields of Cham- 
pagne and the Marne. The legend of the great war of 1870 
is slowly forming itself; and the name under which the 
battles of France were fought, and which symbolised her 
life, was the name of the republic. It is sometimes the van- 
quished cause which leaves deeper associations than the 
victorious. And, as in every cottage in France, since 1815, 
the tradition of the great events and great sufferings of the 
generation before grew personal and living round the lurid 
image of Napoleon, so the graven memories of 1870 and 
187 1 clung with a tragic pathos round the image and name 
of the republic. 

There was thus a basis of sentiment to attach the peasant 
to the republic as an institution. But this would have availed 
little had it not been supported by solid inducements. This 
tendency was turned into a principle by the patience and 
skill of one man. To M. Gambetta is due at once the con- 
ception and the accomplishment of this grand political 
revolution. It is a feat to be ranked amongst the highest 
successes of political sagacity and genuine intuition. As a 



78 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

stroke of policy, it ought to place him amongst the two or 
three statesmen of genius of our time. And the patience and 
dexterity with which this policy was elaborated are as fine 
as the power of the conception. M. Gambetta saw that 
the progress of the social evolution was fatally interrupted 
by the antagonism between the peasant and the artisan, by 
the gulf which divided the one from the other in political 
spirit, and the antipathy of the peasant to the republic from 
which alone anything could come. He saw that the occa- 
sion had arrived when the peasant might come over to the 
republic, when the gulf between him and the workman might 
be bridged, and when both might be rallied round a common 
political ideal. 

With this view he patiently set himself the task to present 
to the mass of rural France the republic as at once the national 
and the conservative symbol. For three years now he has 
laboured with a patience and an energy which would have 
aroused suspicion, had it been less unobtrusive, in order to 
allay the suspicions of the peasants, to show them the re- 
public and the republican party as the real basis of order 
and of industry, to dispel the old association of republican 
with socialist. The noble orations which, whilst free speech 
was permitted, he addressed to France, were always addressed 
to the country at large, and especially the rural elements, 
and were as full of the true conservative temper as they were 
of national sentiment. They had that success which be- 
longs only to the rare orators of an age who know how to 
infuse a new idea into an entire generation. Since free 
speech has been suppressed, his action has been still more 
unceasing in insisting on legality and order, in insisting on 
the republic as the principle of legality, and in throwing 
on the anti-republican parties the character of conspirators 
and revolutionists. Never speaking in the Chamber, he has 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 79 

laboured incessantly to prevent his party from speaking at 
all, and from committing act, word, or attitude of violence ; 
until, alone of the sections of the Chamber, the Left of Gam- 
betta is the party which has never menaced any interest, or 
attempted any cabal, or indulged in any passion, — which 
has been always loyal to every legal right, hostile to every 
change, and resolute against every plot. 

Monarchists, Churchmen, Bourbonists, Orleanists, Im- 
perialists, and Communists have been seen in a phantas- 
magoria of conspiracies, intrigues, and coups d'etat. The 
republic and the Left, which is its guard, alone have repre- 
sented to France and to the world respect for rights, regular 
government, and an era of rest. And if, of this republican 
party, M. Thiers has been the titular head and the tongue, 
undoubtedly M. Gambetta is its genius and its will. Whilst 
Thiers came over to it by the effect of calculation, Gambetta 
created it by his conviction, energy, and self-command. 
And his reward is patent. For two years the factions of 
the Assembly have been growing more odious to the nation, 
whilst the republican majorities have become more certain 
and more complete. The republican party is no longer 
besieged in the great cities by armies of rural conservatives. 
They have sallied out into the country, and both have fra- 
ternised. 

The rural districts are the true stronghold now of the 
republicans. The Catholic West is as stout as the turbu- 
lent South or the industrial North ; and the pastoral centres 
are at one. For the first time in this century the country 
voters have resisted the entire force of -the government 
engine — resisted it, and broken it silently to pieces. The 
extreme angle of Britanny, at once against its landlords, 
its priests, and its officials, returns a republican vote. The 
peasant has not changed his principles or his aims. He is 



80 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

still an arrant conservative, still bent on industrial repose, 
still the sworn foe of all disturbers of Government, from 
whatever side and with whatever end. He has not changed 
his principles, but he has distinctly changed his watchwords. 
And he finds now all that he hates and fears in the enemies 
of the republic. He has said to the kings, the rival kings, 
"It is thou and thy house that trouble Israel." And he is 
a republican because he is a conservative, and because he 
abhors revolution. 

From all sides of France one may hear the republican 
leaders and managers, men who all their lives have looked 
to see the peasant vote undo in a day their labour in the 
cities for years, one may hear these men declare their wonder 
at the new creed of the peasant. "We cannot believe it now 
we see it, we cannot comprehend it, though we have worked 
for it," they say, as the peasants under their eyes vote for the 
republic in defiance of prefet, cure, and mayor. The canny, 
stubborn, suspicious, self-regarding peasant is the same 
man now that he always was, and he is voting for that which 
in his slow, sure way he has found out to be the path of peace, 
order, law, and prosperity. In country towns and rural 
districts it is all the same ; whether it be for members of the 
Assembly, mayors, or municipal council, the republican can- 
didate is chosen. There never was a sillier jest than that 
famous phrase of the "Republic without republicans." 
There are now some six or seven millions of republicans; 
not republicans by theory or conviction or taste, not demo- 
crats, not even reformers, but simply republicans in resist- 
ing a monarchic revolution, and in founding a system of 
law and rest. And this critical political conversion is mainly 
the work of one man. 

There are few men who, in this country, have been more 
hastily judged than M. Gambetta. The Gambetta of reality, 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 8 1 

the man known to parties and voters in France, is as nearly 
as possible the antithesis of the Gambetta of the vulgar 
imagination. The idea that he is an impassioned rhetori- 
cian, a violent demagogue, and a man of phrases, is simply 
ludicrous to those who really know the secret of his influence, 
and his actual mode of working. That he was the one man 
who rose in France, and who roused France, during the 
war; the one man whom the Germans recognised, whom 
they still recognise, as a great force — that he is an orator, 
and capable of Titanic outbursts of energy, is no doubt true ; 
but it is not the light in which he has been seen since the hour 
of the capitulation. This demagogue has for twelve months 
never addressed an audience; this man of phrases has for 
years hardly uttered a word in the Chamber; this violent 
democrat has never let slip a revolutionary suggestion. And 
all the while his influence has been extending, and his action 
growing more definite, and never more so than during the 
time when every republican channel has been shut. 

Far different are the modes in which his power has been 
gained. By the most solid and lawful of all methods of 
gaining influence; by the personal ascendancy of a strong 
nature and a clear brain, exerted silently, daily, and uncon- 
sciously; by sagacious counsels, based on passionate con- 
victions; by fortitude, reticence, self-control, patience, and 
sagacity; by dexterity in seizing any political opportunity; 
by capacity to accept the inevitable, and turn it to better 
uses; by the most difficult of all tasks for a political chief, 
that of rallying, disciplining, and creating a party whilst 
submitting to a succession of defeats without the hope of 
victory or the chance of retaliation — teaching them to 
endure an almost crushing repression without recourse to 
insurrection; these are the means by which Gambetta has 
succeeded in imposing his policy on the republican party, 



82 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

as in imposing the republican party upon France. It is a 
career so truly that of the leader of a national party, such as 
we understand it, that it is strange this has not been more 
fully recognised in England. With untiring energy and 
prudence he has directed the principal republican journal 
which has steadily reorganised the republican party, whilst 
never admitting a chance for prosecution even under a "state 
of siege." Its policy has been strictly conservative, whilst 
at the same time essentially republican. Its task has been 
daily to insist on legality, respect for established institutions, 
the renunciation of all violent panaceas, and the gradual 
formation of a regular government. In the Chamber the 
work of this stirring orator has been to suppress all speeches, 
to organise the party votes, to sustain the courage of the 
waverers after defeat, to repress every outburst of impa- 
tience. Those who go to the Assembly prepared to see the 
Left the aggressive party, have been struck by their patience 
and reticence under every attack, their resolve to avoid all 
discussion, their inflexible principle of recognising no con- 
stituent powers in the Chamber; and at the head of the 
party, intensely active but resolutely silent, persuading, 
encouraging, calming all, but never mounting the tribune, 
the greatest popular orator of France. 

It has been a task of peculiar difficulty, because, whilst 
reassuring the rural conservatives, M. Gambetta was risking 
the indignation of the city democrats. His most violent 
enemies are found in the Commune and the friends of the 
Commune. These fanatics, to whom metaphysical theories 
are of more importance than national results, have fallen 
upon him as the worst of all possible enemies — a traitor 
to democracy. The late rupture between M. Gambetta 
and the Paris radicals has been and still is a real danger to 
M. Gambetta. His grand policy of bringing the rural con- 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 83 

servatives and the town democrats for once into line upon 
the ground of a conservative republic, may of course always 
fail if the city republicans are incapable of adopting a com- 
promise. It is true that the compromise to which they were 
invited was one of those compromises in which one side 
appears to yield everything; for the republic of the last 
twelve months has been as oppressive and anti-republican 
as the worst of the tyrannies which preceded it, and as arbi- 
trary as any precarious government could be made to be. 
And if M. Gambetta and his party seemed to be more than 
accepting, almost supporting this system, as if for mere sake 
of its name, it was hard for the popular masses to believe 
that they got anything by the name. There are, however, 
two things in the republic of Marshal MacMahon: in the 
first place the institution is the republic, and in the next 
place the men are avowedly temporary. It was not, like 
the empire, a dynasty and a permanent despotism; it is 
not, like the monarchy, a principle and a class-tyranny. 
It was a temporary repression, grievous to bear, but worth 
bearing for the sake of all that it made possible. 

If it has irritated democrats in France, it has puzzled 
constitutionalists in England, to see the entire party of the 
Left resolutely clinging to a Chamber which they branded 
as mere usurpation, accepting without protest its incendiary 
decisions, and ardently working at its combinations whilst 
denying its right to make a law. To their own friends they 
too often seemed to be men who were taking part with a 
cabal, which in set words declared itself at war with the 
nation, a cabal which the republican minority were utterly 
powerless to restrain. Their policy, however, was a per- 
fectly intelligible one. The Assembly represented legality, 
and it also represented the republic; for if the Assembly 
was not the legal power of the nation, and if it had not ac- 



84 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

cepted the republic, there was nothing legal but the empire, 
and the field was open to any successful adventure. And 
it was of the last importance that the plank of legality should 
be retained in the storm, and the republic appear before the 
nation as the sole legitimate power. Then the army would 
obey the Assembly and its chosen authorities, and to defy 
the Assembly was to open the era of pronunciamenios. Again, 
had the slightest pretext been given for repressive measures 
against the republican party, had a suspicion found a foot- 
hold that it was engaged in insurrectionary schemes, the 
rural conservatives would have instantly flung off from the 
republic as being no longer identified with order. The 
republicans, then, would have been the conspirators, the 
malcontents, as of old, and the legitimate holders of power 
would again have been saviours of society. This old, old 
game of the retrograde cause has been utterly checkmated 
by the patience, the self-control, and the far-sightedness of 
the republican leaders. 

Their parliamentary tactics have been simple in design, 
though very trying in execution. Their plan has been to 
accept to the utmost the legal authority of the Chamber, to 
check its excesses by skilful tactics, whilst never appearing 
as a factious or insurgent element. A single violent protest 
would have called out all the revolutionary instincts, have 
called them out to no purpose, and to certain repression; 
whilst a direct appeal to the nation would have broken the 
confidence of the conservative peasants. This is the secret 
of what some have called the tameness of Gambetta, and 
what the ardent democrats have attacked as open apostasy. 
In the language of one of them, the business of the party is 
/aire le mort, to assume extinction whilst working with in- 
tense activity and watching for every opportunity. It is a 
policy needing first-rate organisation and mutual confidence, 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 85 

great ingenuity and energy, with the power of waiting for 
the chance. The grand aim was to bring about a dissolu- 
tion, whilst never declaring war on the majority, or appeal- 
ing to the people against them. Gradually it was believed 
that the play of parties would discredit and defeat each suc- 
ceeding government, until the failure of every combination 
should bring about dissolution in very despair. 

It is the fashion in England to make merry over the French 
Assembly, and the gross caricatures of its public sittings 
with which leading journals indulge the pharisaical vanity 
of English constitutionalists have misled many amongst us 
as to the real character of that Assembly. But, as all the 
world in France knows, the public sittings are merely the 
interludes of its real activity, and are often devoted, like 
those of other parliaments, to the noisiest jesters or most 
violent bores. The art of parliamentary manoeuvring is 
not the noblest of modern inventions; but, such as the art 
is, it is practised in France with consummate ability. At 
any rate, the tactics which the Left have displayed in a situa- 
tion of desperate emergency may be ranked with the best 
examples of discipline and sagacity in party organisation. 
The defeat of the Monarchic plot in November was a happy 
instance of what can be done by an indomitable minority. 
Even before Easter the De Broglie Government would have 
been defeated, and have disappeared, had not the plans 
of M. Gambetta been ruined by the unlucky blunder of 
M. Ledru-Rollin. The policy at last has succeeded, and at 
length the impossibility of the actual Assembly continuing 
to govern the country has been made manifest by the mere 
machinery of parliamentary strategy, without a single excuse 
for the charge that the Left have appealed to force, or have 
quitted the ground of strict legality. 

The result of this policy has been to extend the republican 



86 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

sentiment in France as it could have been extended in no 
other way. By tlje universal consent of all parties, an honest 
appeal to the country at this moment would show an over- 
whelming republican majority. According to good author- 
ities, a direct and honest appeal to the nation, on the three 
typical causes, would return republic, empire, and monarchy 
in proportions of six, two, and a half. According to some, 
Gambetta would be carried as deputy in four-fifths of all 
the departments of France. But if the country is essentially 
republican, it is at the same time truly conservative. The 
advanced democrats are in a scattered minority, and, since 
the collapse of the communal insurrection, a new democratic 
rising is impossible for many a year. Hence, whilst nothing 
but a republican settlement will ultimately satisfy the coun- 
try, nothing but a moderate government can hope for per- 
manent support. Fortunately, the men of the Left are 
clearly convinced of this; they are aware of the necessity 
of patience, and see that their day has not yet come. Per- 
haps it would be the most desirable solution if, after one or 
two intermediate steps, a strong republican government 
could be established on the type of men like M. Grevy. To 
the communards and the ultra-radicals no doubt M. Grevy 
represents nothing but the bourgeois reaction, and M. Gam- 
betta himself is to them much of the same colour. But 
communards and ultra-radicals for the present are out of 
the field, and M. Gambetta himself is a long way from being 
understood as the practical statesman that he is. 

All these and similar calculations would be worthless if 
there was ground for the current belief in the success of 
imperialist plots. Because military adventurers have so 
often succeeded in France and elsewhere, because Napoleon 
III. seized an empire amidst the wrangles of republicans, 
we are all apt to assume that the party have only to fix their 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 87 

day to proclaim Napoleon IV. It may be so, and he would 
be a bold man who felt certain that any given thing was 
impossible in the present aspect of France. But there seems 
little in the state of the country to justify these expectations. 
The imperialists are powerful, or rather conspicuous, by 
their audacity, skill, and cohesion, by the experience of 
twenty years of government and power, by the goodwill of 
large sections of the army, by the general tradition and pres- 
tige of that which has filled men's minds and accomplished 
great changes. For twenty years every adventurer of courage 
and ambition was a born imperialist; every successful capi- 
talist, soldier, or official was in some sort pledged to the only 
party which offered him a career, and for which he could 
feel a fellow-feeling. The second empire was a sort of grand 
Credit Mobilier or joint-stock company (unlimited) for 
military, financial, or professional speculators. The men 
who meant to win, and who knew how to win, were all en- 
tered as members of this great national Jockey Club. And 
naturally, though the company itself has been wound up, 
its old frequenters are the men who make a great noise in 
the world, and fill it with rumours of a new revival of the 
concern. 

This is perhaps the reason why the French Rentes are 
an inverse and not a direct barometer of public affairs in 
France. The witty Dean said there was no such fool as the 
Three per Cents. The Three per Cents may be very short- 
sighted, though in England they bear some relation to pros- 
pects of national prosperity. But the French Three per 
Cents are not only foolish and shortsighted, but they give 
way to political passion. A vision of successful conspiracy 
sends them up; the probability of civil war makes them 
buoyant; and the prospect of a really settled government 
will send the quotations down to "heavy" or "flat." The 



88 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

farther off grows the chance of the country being turned into 
a national "hell," the more depressed grows the rentier 
world. And as the French nation in general do not do much 
in Rentes, their rise or fall will depend on the prospect which 
the speculator class may entertain of a legal exploitation of 
society. A party like this is naturally strong, and it would 
be strange indeed if we did not hear a great deal of its ac- 
tivity. But it lacks two things now which enabled it for- 
merly to seize power and found an empire. The imperial 
tradition was strong with the peasants, and it was paramount 
with the army. It was the only thing with an imposing 
past and with a possible future. Both these are lost to it 
now. The tradition of the empire is shattered for ever in 
the homes of the peasantry. The Church has laboured to 
uproot it, and laboured we may hope for the republic, not 
for itself. And what of that tradition the Church failed to 
uproot was uprooted by successive mayors and prefets of 
Gambetta, Thiers, and De Broglie. 

We may take it as admitted that whilst the empire is 
strong amongst successful bourgeois and large sections of 
the rich, it has died out for ever from the rural districts of 
France. As to the army, we are assured on all sides that 
it is only partly imperialist, and that, by the best accounts, 
to an extent not exceeding a third. On the other hand, a 
section in the lower ranks, hardly inferior in number, is 
just as distinctly republican; whilst the bulk may be taken 
as unwilling to be the tools of any political party. The 
esprit de corps of the old Imperial Guard is no longer avail- 
able; the sense of power as of a praetorian band is gone; 
and the army itself is far more likely to fall to pieces than 
to impose a new dynasty on the country. These are not 
hopeful elements for the Imperial restoration; and though 
perhaps in the chaos of parties it is not altogether impossible, 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 89 

it would need a conjunction of chances, and a genius for 
conspiracy, such as are not at all likely to be vouchsafed to 
the prayers of the Corsican band. If they were going to 
succeed in their coup d'etat or pronunciamento, why has it 
not come off already — for assuredly as good opportunities 
have arisen as are ever likely to arise? And if it were to 
succeed, and the flaccid lad at Chiselhurst came back in 
the purple and the bees, how long would his reign be likely 
to endure ? The empire is by its essence an autocracy — 
a democratic autocracy, it may be, but in any case a govern- 
ment ultimately resting in a single hand. That is its strength 
and its claim. If it were anything else, it would not differ 
from any of the other parties of moral disorder which, since 
the fall of M. Thiers, have been struggling to possess them- 
selves of France. But where is the strong man of the third 
empire, and how would any of his viziers or marshals differ 
from the rest of the generals who conspire and vapour at 
Versailles ? 

There is, however, another danger to which France is 
exposed, perhaps more real than Socialist insurrections or 
Imperial plots. In the condition in which France lies, she 
is practically at the mercy of her late enemy. As every one 
but the English ministry saw, the so-called peace of Frank- 
fort left France utterly exposed to a second overthrow at 
the will of Germany. In a military sense three weeks would 
suffice to bring the German Emperor to the gates of Paris, 
and no one seems to see anything to stop him. The military 
caste throughout Germany long to finish their work; the 
military and official caste are scandalised that France should 
presume to live; that she should be still wealthy is a clear 
casus belli. Prince Bismarck is said to speak of the five 
milliards with the self-reproach of a bandit chief who dis- 
covers that a captive whom he has just ransomed could have 



90 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

found double the sum, had he been wrung rather more 
sharply. It is certain that renewal of the war has been 
more than once contemplated in Germany, and is still looked 
on as merely adjourned. The safety of France therefore 
rests only on the good sense of the German people, and 
their power to resist the criminal ambition of the German 
chiefs. No one in France or out of it can seriously believe 
that the French army is in any way equal to meet the German 
army in the field. The reorganisation of the army has been 
much talked about, but all accounts concur in showing that 
it has not gone beyond that stage. Catastrophes like that 
of 1870 are not repaired in a moment, and every authority 
agrees in the opinion that the army is still under the influence 
of that complete overthrow. 1 

There is not the slightest ground for the assertion so sedu- 
lously repeated by official organs in Berlin, that France is 
preparing to renew the contest. Neither in nor out of the 
army is there any dream of the kind. Frenchmen indeed 
would be wanting in every sense of patriotism did they ac- 
cept the partition of their country as final, and took the 
treaty of Frankfort as the date of a new national era. But 
as it is impossible that it could be otherwise, it is hypocrisy 
to pretend that because Frenchmen do not admit what it 
would be base in them to admit, they are therefore preparing 
for war. There is all the difference between declining to 
believe the finality of an act of conquest and the active inten- 
tion to dispute it as a fact. Nations are often compelled to 
recognise as facts what they would be craven to sanction as 
rights. For a generation after Waterloo, the French people 
talked of revenge more loudly and more unanimously than 

1 This great danger, as we now know, was imminent in 1875, an< ^ was 
only averted by the secret influence of the sovereigns of England, of Russia, 
and European diplomacy. 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 



91 



they have ever done towards Germany before Sedan or 
since. 

If our statesmen in 1815-1825 had acted on the assump- 
tion that these inevitable protests were equivalent to a na- 
tional intention to renew the war, they would have acted in 
bad faith and with wanton aggression. Since no conceivable 
acts of spoliation, which German hypocrisy calls guarantees, 
could have forced the French people to acknowledge them 
as based on incontestable right, unless the French people 
had lost all sentiment of honour along with the loss of the 
provinces, it is ill faith to see the renewal of war in every 
groan for the cities and the citizens which have been torn 
from them. If the annexation of half of all France had 
been found necessary to the strategic combinations of Von 
Moltke, it would have been the duty of the other half to 
refuse to acknowledge it as a right, however much they 
were forced to accept it as a fact. 

The question then is solely one of fact, and the patent 
fact is that France is not contemplating war, in any sense 
that belongs to political realities, in any sense in which it 
is not just as true to say that Germany is contemplating 
war with Russia, or Russia with Germany. Every nation 
which maintains an army assumes that war is not impossible, 
and every nation which has been dismembered hopes the 
day may come when its lost member may return. In this 
sense, and in this sense only, is France contemplating re- 
venge; and in this sense Denmark may be said to be con- 
templating war on Germany, or Turkey on Greece, or Spain 
on England. There is not a single party, not a single journal, 
in France which hints at a renewal of the war. Responsible 
men of all sections, and indeed the people at large, are far 
too conscious of their own prostration, and of the utter mad- 
ness of the attempt, to make such a policy endurable. Of 



92 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

all parties the republican party, if any, is pledged to the 
national honour; and of all men in it, Gambetta represents 
most distinctly the principle of no surrender. But the 
republican party and its chief stand pledged to a policy of 
peace. And though a political party may not always dis- 
close their real intentions, a party would be instantly dis- 
credited which publicly discountenanced a national desire. 
According to a popular theory, a theory most grateful 
to German arrogance and British morality, the entire French 
nation is in a state of physical, moral, and national decrepi- 
tude. There are always wiseacres who derive solid satis- 
faction from shaking their heads over Sodom and Gomorrah, 
and explaining the mysteries of national corruption. Curi- 
ously enough it is a practice in which all nations indulge 
in turn, and with the smallest possible data. A generation 
ago it was the fashion to groan over the decadence of Eng- 
land, the vitals of which, we were told, were eaten up with 
pauperism, gin, and the Haymarket. At another time 
Germany was understood to be reduced to a state of univer- 
sal syncope by addiction to metaphysics and nicotine. At 
another time Russia is supposed to be the victim of general 
gangrene, and a great moralist has warned us that nothing 
can come out of Italy but dancers and singers. These 
wholesale indictments against nations are equally easy and 
equally absurd. When thirty-six millions of men in the 
very centre of Europe are found in a state of real decay, 
the knell will have struck for the civilisation of Europe. 
Europe is a political unit, and its civilisation is homogeneous, 
and if one-fifth of its area is in a dying state, Europe has 
not long to live. The brain or the heart of a living body 
might as well dilate with a gloomy satisfaction about the 
signs of cancer impending over the misguided stomach, as 
Englishmen or Germans moralise over the signs of dissolu- 



FRANCE AFTER WAR 93 

tion in France. Just as it is the conviction of profound 
provincials that our modern Babylon is a mystery of abomi- 
nation, so it is the faith of profound politicians that some 
particular race in Europe is rotting towards its end ; so, too, 
it is the inward belief of the superior American that the old 
world is used up, and so the apostles of a new life in Salt 
Lake will assure us that the old American states are doomed. 
Of all satire national satire is the most obvious, as it is cer- 
tainly the most monotonous. 

That society in France is in active convulsion and transi- 
tion, that her national cohesion is suffering most violent 
shocks, that classes and strata of her society are on the point 
of final extinction, all this is too obvious to be discussed. 
But the state of exhaustion and corruption within her is not 
nearly so great as that which some other nations have expe- 
rienced, and which more than once she has experienced 
herself. This does not to-day approach the state of dis- 
organisation and apparent death in which Germany lay in 
the Thirty Years' War, or in which Prussia lay on the mor- 
row of Jena; nor does it approach that which France her- 
self has known in the mediaeval civil wars, or in the declining 
years of Louis XIV. A superficial moralist, who dilated 
on the state of England during the reign of Charles II., 
would have found little to remind him that she had just 
produced Cromwell and Shakespeare, and was about to pro- 
duce Newton and Marlborough. The elasticity of France 
in recovering from the havoc of the war, and in unfolding 
incredible resources, has filled the world with wonder, and 
has filled Prince Bismarck's soul with pangs of covetous 
remorse. In very truth France, for generations, has never 
been so laborious, so thrifty, so prosperous, so ingenious, 
so rich, so active as she is at this moment. Amidst black 
spots marked with unutterable corruption, and perhaps with 



94 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

physical decline, the millions who cultivate her vast and 
prolific area are as hardy, alert, and sober as ever they 
were known to us before. Absinthe, Ernest Feydeau, cafes 
chantants, and baccarat are not much in vogue amongst 
them; and if these reach as much as a million, there are 
thirty-five millions to whom they are unknown. A people 
so intelligent and vigorous have raised France before out 
of deeper disasters, and with far less available resources. 

It may well be that worse is in store for her yet, and that 
the lowest point of her agony has not even now been reached. 
It may well be that a generation or generations may still be 
needed for the final settlement of France. The task which 
she has set herself to solve is one which demands generations, 
and in which even greater catastrophes may seem insig- 
nificant. The passage from an exhausted to a new type of 
society is invariably surrounded with convulsion and dis- 
aster. And if out of the ebb and flow of the revolutionary 
struggle we are destined to see grow up in France a perma- 
nent and solid republic, victorious over the opposing forces, 
whether feudal, military, or Catholic, the memory of the 
struggles through which it had been won would be speedily 
effaced, and the price at which it was secured would be cheer- 
fully and easily accepted. 



IV 

LEON GAMBETTA 

(1882) 

This was a memorial address on the death of Gambetta, 
December 31, 1882, and was delivered in Newton Hall 
shortly after the state funeral, January 6, 1883. U 
was published in the Contemporary Review {vol. xliii.). 
It is in form what the French call an Eloge, and it 
must be read as the funeral discourse given at a public 
ceremony by one who was deeply absorbed in the crisis 
of the Republic and who had long been in personal re- 
lations with the dead statesman, his friends, and col- 
leagues. A long journey round the French Provinces 
in the autumn of i8yj, during the great Electoral cam- 
paign, to decide if Marshal MacMahon should se sou- 
mettre or se demettre, when the writer sent a series of 
letters to the Times, and had been in touch with all the 
Republican committees centralised by Gambetta, had 
given him a special insight into the efforts which forced 
the Marshal to resign in December 1877 (1908). 

For good or for evil, Le*on Gambetta was bound up with 
the Republic as was no other contemporary life. He was 
the first statesman of European importance formally to 
offer his public homage to Comte as the greatest mind of 
the nineteenth century; and formally to adopt, as his lead- 
ing idea in politics, Comte's great aphorism: "Progress 

95 



96 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

can only arise out of the development of Order." But it 
is not for this that Gambetta holds a place of prime impor- 
tance in my eyes. The doings of a statesman are what 
concern us, and not his protestations. And it is in the region 
of action that Gambetta foreshadows the type of the Republi- 
can statesman — rudely and incompletely, no doubt — but 
with all the essential elements. He is the first European 
statesman of this century who is heart and soul Republican ; 
the only one whose fibre is entirely popular; who saw that 
the Republic implied a real social reconstruction; he is the 
only European statesman who is equally zealous for progress 
and for order, and most assuredly he is the only statesman 
of this century who has formally thrown away every kind 
of theological crutch. 

This is no panegyric of a public man. Of such we have 
had enough. It is no critical analysis of a striking personality. 
We are met here neither to bury Caesar, nor to praise him. 
Brutus and Cassius and the rest have told us that he was 
ambitious, and had many grievous faults. I am not about 
to dispute it. There are many things in his public career, 
especially in its later years, which we wholly fail to reconcile, 
not only with the best type of the statesman, but with any 
reasonable version of his own principles. As to his private 
life, there are things, perhaps, gross and unworthy, and a 
public man has no private life. But unworthy if they be, 
they were not of the kind which seriously disable a public 
career. He was not a corrupting pedantocrat like Guizot, 
nor a corrupted cynic like Thiers; he was not a king of 
gamblers like Napoleon, nor a king of jobbers like Louis 
Philippe. He was a jovial, unabashed son of Paris; with- 
out special refinement of life, or sensitive delicacy of con- 
science. We have yet no means of proving the truth of the 
stories that we hear of the kind of men who from time to 



LEON GAMBETTA 



97 



time shared his intimacy, and of the enterprises or adven- 
tures to which he allowed himself to be made a more or less 
blinded accomplice. Let us leave these tales for time to 
reveal. However they turn out, the essential man in the 
main is known to us now. 

If he allowed himself familiarity with unworthy adven- 
turers, certain it is, that in all parts of France he retained 
till his death the devoted attachment of the most honourable 
spirits of his country. If his name was used at times to 
back up a financial job, it is yet most clear that with porten- 
tous opportunities for serving himself, he neither made nor 
spent a fortune. If his policy was not always consistent 
with a high sense of honour, it was never dictated by vulgar 
ambition. Coarseness of nature, whether in private and 
in public life, is no final bar to greatness in a statesman. 
The greatest names in political history have often been soiled 
with unedifying weakness and unscrupulous expedients. 
The statesmen of history are as little the types of moral 
purity as the saints are types of practical sagacity. A states- 
man in an era like this is a man by necessity of compromise 
and expedients. His agents he takes as he finds them; and 
he takes them with good and bad together. And when all 
this is said, we must judge them in the rough as they are. 
Energy and sagacity, and the genius to give the true lead to 
forty millions of men, are qualities of such transcendent 
value to mankind, that we must hail them at all costs wher- 
ever we find them. And these qualities were assuredly in 
Le*on Gambetta. 

I will take but four cardinal facts about his career, and 
consider him, firstly, as the true creator of the Republic; 
secondly, as a type of the statesman of the people ; thirdly, as 
the representative of the union of order and progress ; and 
fourthly, as representative of the secular movement in politics. 



98 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

In every one of these, and in all of them in combination, 
Gambetta is the only French statesman of the first order 
whom this century has produced. 

Of the first order ? it is asked. Yes ! Whatever judg- 
ment we may pass on his work, there can be no real dispute 
about his power. He was hardly laid in his grave, when 
the very existence of the Republic was suddenly challenged, 
and through all ranks of Republicans a sudden panic arose, 
men's hearts failing them for fear. A week before his death, 
in spite of disquiet and confusion, the Constitution in France 
seemed as much a thing of course as the Constitution in 
England. A week after his burial everything seemed an 
open question again, as on the eve of Sedan. He is the one 
Frenchman whom the keen statesmen of Germany took to 
be of paramount importance to Germany; he is the one 
Frenchman who represented something definite to every 
man throughout the civilised world possessing the simplest 
notion of politics; and he was the one Frenchman whose 
name and character were known to every elector in France. 
The death of Gambetta was to France what the death of 
Cavour was to Italy; what the death of Bismarck will be 
to Germany. At the day of his death he filled the minds 
of French politicians more than Guizot ever did, or Thiers, 
or any of the nameless Ministers of empire and monarchy — 
more than Peel ever filled men's thoughts amongst us, more 
even than Gladstone does now. 

His brief hour of office was an interlude. He is almost 
the one Frenchman of our times who could fall from office 
without disappearing from public life. Office made no 
difference to his personal power, except that it hampered it 
by arousing a storm of jealousies. Death, as usual, is the 
true measure of greatness, and death has revealed to us with 
startling force what is the Republic with Gambetta and 



LEON GAMBETTA 



99 



what it is without him. Right or wrong, this is power ; this 
is one of those pre-eminent personalities which occur but 
now and then in a century. Here is the great man (it is 
one of those facts which we must take as facts, whether we 
like it or not), and it is with justice that his followers say, 
"Here is the man who is not of the order of the Jules Favres 
and the Jules Simons, or the Jules Ferrys, or even of the 
Thiers and the Guizots — here is a born leader of the order 
of the Dantons and the Hoches." 

I. Take him as the creator of the Republic. There 
were three successive epochs in which Gambetta was the 
true author of the Republic: in 1868-9, * n 1870-1, in 1876-8. 
For sixteen years the Empire had lain like a nightmare upon 
France; corrupting it from above, crushing it within, weak- 
ening it without, degrading and stifling the entire French 
nation. All the better elements of the people revolted; all 
were ready for a resurrection — but who gave the word ? 
Always and everywhere Gambetta. His energy, his courage, 
his faith in the Republic, his scorn of the Empire, rang like 
an electric shock through France. In November 1868, 
the date of his famous speech denouncing the Empire, he 
was a briefless, unknown barrister. In the early spring 
of 1869 he was the rival, the terror, and the judge of the 
Empire. The Emperor in these last two years shook and 
cowered before a young lawyer. 

It is easy to say that hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen 
felt this, that Paris was seething with insurrection, and the 
whole thinking class, and the entire working class, was in 
defiance. True; but both wanted the tongue, the soul, 
the heart, and they found those in Gambetta. The Jules 
Simons, the Rocheforts, and Prevost Paradols, might write 
smart articles; Delescluze and Blanqui could conspire; 
but neither epigrams nor conspiracies could shake the Em- 

LOFC 



100 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

pire. It needed an agitator who was also a statesman. 
Gambetta was both; and he struck the Empire as neither 
fifty Jules Simons nor a hundred Blanquis could strike it. 

The Empire ended, as we know, in an utter wreck; and 
again, on the morrow of Sedan, the Republic was the work 
of Gambetta. He planned it, he organised it, he established 
it. In that shameful overthrow of France, in the winter of 
1870, the one redeeming effort stood out clear; and again, 
one man alone struck the imagination of Europe, of Germany, 
of France. Such a negation of all that is sound and manly 
as was the Empire, cannot afflict a people for a generation 
without leaving a heritage of blight and corruption; and 
with all my love for the French name and people, I cannot 
deny that in 1870 it had sunk as low as a nation can sink 
without death. From that torpor France was saved by 
the energy of Gambetta. That one man, a young, un- 
known, penniless lawyer of thirty-two, roused France from 
her slumber, upheld her banner against hopeless odds, 
made the French people feel again they were a people, 
and planted in their hearts the image of Republic instead 
of Empire. 

Then it was that the Republic was formed: Gambetta's 
name was made a household word in France. Into every 
village, from Ushant to Nice, from Dunkirk to St. Sebastian, 
the conscript of 1870 carried back the tale of a leader who 
had kept alive the French name. Since the days of the 
First Napoleon, no name had ever penetrated into every 
heart in France as did Gambetta's. He was the one man 
known to all living Frenchmen — man, woman, and child 
— and known as the inspirer of a new sense — love of the 
country. He was the moral inspirer of the nation; for he 
recalled the spirit of the men who fought at Valmy and 
Jemappes; nay, it is no profanation to say it, he recalled 






LEON GAMBETTA iot 

Jeanne Dare herself. He restored the French nation to 
itself, giving France back to Europe as one of her great 
forces. This is the imperishable work of the Republic of 
1870; and for this the Republic of 1870 will be remembered 
when Bismarck and Moltke and the German Empire are 
names for historical research. 

It failed. Yes ! it failed, because the miserable mon- 
archies and empires, which have succeeded each other in 
France since the Revolution, had crushed out of Frenchmen 
the national spirit; and no energy or genius can make a 
nation in an hour. But I say it advisedly — now that twelve 
years have passed, and all the facts are known — that but 
for the intrigues and fears of men like Bazaine, and Trochu, 
and Thiers, and the wild intestine hatred that a generation 
of civil war had bred, and the feebleness and the selfishness 
that a generation of Empire had bred, the defence would 
have succeeded. 

The Germans knew it, and feared it. It was impossible 
for Germany to conquer France had Frenchmen been true 
to themselves. The grandsons of the men who had repelled 
Europe at five sides at once were conquered by a nation no 
bigger, and far less powerful in material resources than 
themselves. I can never forget how Gambetta himself 
spoke of this to me. In a long conversation on the war, I 
asked him years after all was over : " Could then the defence 
have been continued in 1871?" "Certainly!" he groaned 
out bitterly, crunching his clasped hands. "Of course it 
could!" "Then why did they give in?" said I. "C'etait 
le cceur qui leur manquait," he roared out, bounding off 
his seat, and his face purple with shame and rage. " Because 
they were out of heart," said he. And I felt what Danton 
had been in '93. 

It is said this is not very much to have done. Gambetta 



102 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

was an eloquent talker, and did nothing but put into elo- 
quent words the thoughts of thousands. In one sense that 
is true. The statesman ex hypothesi is not the original 
thinker ; he is never the lonely discoverer of a peculiar truth. 
Nor is he the mere mouthpiece of other men's schemes. 
The man who touches the brains and hearts of his time 
with that sympathetic and guiding note which brings them 
to one act at the given time — the man who makes the current 
idea and the dominant feeling burn in thirty millions of 
spirits at once, who utters the true word at the right time — 
this is the statesman; and the man of this sort is rare, and 
appears but once in a generation or two. 

The work of Gambetta in 1868, or in 1870, was in the 
main the work of a single idea. His work in 1877 was far 
more complex, and far more truly of the political sort. The 
great struggle in 1877 between Despotism and Republic — 
for that was the true issue then, as we now see — was in a 
marvellous sense the work of Gambetta. The long six 
months' struggle of France with the Government of Combat, 
under MacMahon and De Broglie, the consummate skill 
with which all the Republican parties were restrained, sus- 
tained, and concentrated, the order, self-restraint, and 
discipline of the country under a series of reckless provoca- 
tions, the grasp over an intricate network of electoral move- 
ments from one end of France to another, the marvellous 
success in face of desperate pressure, the ease, order, and 
completeness of the triumph, its liberal and noble spirit, 
and the rejection of all vindictive retaliation — this was 
the work of Gambetta alone. I was myself at that time in 
all parts of France, and I was in constant intercourse with 
leaders of the movement in Paris and in the country. One 
and all would say, "We do not know the data ourselves, but 
Gambetta has the whole machinery of the party in his hands. 



LEON GAMBETTA 103 

He knows the facts in every constituency in France. He 
has them all in his head; he assures us of success; and we 
trust him." France did trust him in 1877 5 an d the Republic 
was made. 

Thus three times the Republic was due to Gambetta: 
to his audacity in 1868, to his resolution in 1870, to his sa- 
gacity in 1877. And to be the foremost bold man, the fore- 
most resolute man, the foremost sagacious man of your 
generation, is to be the great man. To be the great man 
who founds the Republic is to be the man of the century. 
I take of this century in Europe, Canning, Peel, Cobden, 
Gladstone, in England; Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi, in 
Italy; Stein and Bismarck, in Germany; Deak and Kos- 
suth, in Hungary; Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield, in America; 
and I say that the foundation of the Republic in France is 
a work far greater and more difficult than any which they 
undertook. 

The Republic in France is the condition of all progress. 
The old Europe of feudalism cannot disappear, the new 
Europe of the people cannot begin, till the Republic is 
founded. It means the definite extinction of hereditary 
claims of every kind, the final admission of capacity and 
merit to every function in the state. The Republic is the 
issue of all modern history since the sixteenth century; it 
is the condition of all future progress since the eighteenth 
century ended. It is the great political problem of modern 
Europe ; ripe for solution only in France : already attained 
in a modified form by England ; still hovering in the balance 
elsewhere. But the problem of the nineteenth century is 
the establishment of the Republic in France; and the man 
who as yet has done most to establish it is assuredly Leon 
Gambetta. 

II. I take him next as the statesman of the new social 



104 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

strata; and here again it is certain that no single politician 
in Europe within this century has been at once a foremost 
power in Europe, and a man of the people in origin, habit, 
interest, and sympathy. The type of Lincoln and Garfield 
is common enough in the United States. But in Europe, 
in this century, there has been no other example. Men 
like Cavour and Bismarck are great forces; but they belong 
by race and training to the old feudal classes. Mr. Glad- 
stone and Mr. Disraeli did not belong to them by birth; 
but their training and their habits were as much those of 
the governing classes as Lord Derby's or Lord Salisbury's. 
Mr. Gladstone has the popular fibre and the popular sym- 
pathy; but he has never abandoned nor defied the old aris- 
tocratic orders. I do not say it would be wise for an Eng- 
lish politician to do so; but in France it is the condition of 
true Republican force. Neither Thiers, nor GreVy, nor 
any of the elder statesmen have ever stood forth as direct 
representatives of the people. Gambetta alone, of the men 
of European position, has done so. His memorable words, 
that the Government of France must pass to new social 
strata, was no idle phrase. 

Gambetta, even if for a moment he indulged in luxury, 
lived, and died, and was buried the son of the grocer of 
Cahors. He not only felt sympathy with the populace, but 
he never could cease to be of the populace himself. I have 
seen him within recent years myself living like any young 
beginner in literature or science, as completely a son of the 
people as when he talked and laughed in the Cafe* Procope. 
I am far from saying that this is necessary or even desirable 
in every country in Europe; but in France it is. The only 
possible Republican ruler in France is the man of the people. 
And it is of prime importance to Europe to show that the 
son of a country shopman can reach the first place in his 



LEON GAMBETTA 105 

country before he is forty, and without ceasing to be the son 
of the shopman. And here again I say that it is a thing of 
great moment in the world that the death of the son of a 
provincial tradesman should be an event of European im- 
portance, and that he should have the burial of a chief of 
the state. 

III. I take him next as the first modern Frenchman 
who combined Revolutionary ends with Conservative meth- 
ods — that is to say, who was resolved to carry out the prin- 
ciples of the Revolution, both those of 1789, 1791, and 1848, 
by means of popular conviction, and not by coups-de-main 
and terror. He was, as no other Frenchman in this cen- 
tury has been, trusted at once by the masses of the cities, 
and by the masses of the peasants. The workmen of the 
great cities of France are at present in a state of revolutionary 
excitement; the peasants and farmers of the country are 
the most purely Conservative class in Europe. I mean 
by Conservative, averse to all doubtful experiments, whether 
backwards or forwards. It is quite true that Gambetta 
was so Conservative that he had lost a large part of his influ- 
ence with the workmen of Paris and Lyons. He would 
probably, had he lived, have lost even more. But he died, 
by free vote, Member for Belleville, the most insurgent 
quarter of Paris. He who did this at the same time possessed 
the confidence of the mass of the rural voters. This was 
to unite Order and Progress, as no other foremost politician 
of France has ever done in our time. They have to choose 
the one or the other — the changes desired by the mass of 
the workmen, or the permanence loved by the mass of the 
peasants. They are avowed Revolutionists or avowed Con- 
servatives; men who, like Thiers and Grevy, influence the 
middle class without influencing workmen at all; or men 
like Clemenceau, who lead the workmen, but not the rich 



106 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

and the peasantry. Gambetta was the one Frenchman 
of modern times who could induce the Revolutionists to 
follow constitutional means to their ends, whilst inducing 
the Conservatives to face and accept a new order of govern- 
ment. He had founded, and, had he lived, he would pos- 
sibly have secured, what M. Lafitte has called an organic, 
progressive, Republican party. 

He had hardly succeeded, when cut short in death. Nor 
can we be at all sure that in any case he would have suc- 
ceeded in his task. The situation of France is extraordi- 
narily difficult ; one that makes government for the moment 
almost impossible. The democratic mania (and by that 
I mean the passion of groups and of individuals to reject 
every centre of power but that which promotes their own 
particular nostrums), this democratic frenzy has gone so 
far that we may well doubt if any government by opinion 
is now possible. Free government means government by 
consent of the governed and by rational guidance of their 
convictions. But when a society has got into that state 
that the majority of energetic natures hold it as the first 
duty of a man not to be governed at all ; when opinion is in 
that state that in place of rational convictions society is 
saturated with prejudices incompatible with each other, 
and agreeing only in being impervious to reason at all — 
then government (by conviction at least) is nearly a hopeless 
task. I am not saying that France has reached this hopeless 
state; but the democratic poison has gone nearly as far as 
is compatible with rational existence. 

We, to whom the Republic is the normal condition of 
the most advanced civilisation, who call for a social and not 
a mere plutocratic Republic, are as far as ever from the 
democratic system. Let us explain these terms which are 
used so loosely in England. By Republican Government 



LEON GAMBETTA I07 

we mean that government which represents the mass of 
the people without privileged families of any kind, or any 
governing class, or any hereditary office. It is government 
in the name of the people, in the interests of all equally, in 
sympathy with the people; where, so far as the state is 
concerned, neither birth, nor wealth, nor class, give any 
prerogative whatever. We mean, in fact, by Republican 
what is on the lips of all English Liberals, but is so little 
to be found in the facts of English politics. By Democracy 
we mean the direct control of the machinery of government 
by all citizens equally, or rather, by such of them as can 
succeed in making themselves heard, and for the time para- 
lysing the rest. This government by everybody in turn is 
the negation of the true Republican Government; for in 
place of being the government by conviction and consent 
of the people in the interest of all, it is the arbitrary enforce- 
ment of a set of narrow interests by small groups in endless 
succession. 

The virus of democracy (which, in the sense in which 
I use it, is so little republican or popular government, that 
it is rather a series of impotent tyrannies by petty groups), 
the virus of democracy may have gone so far in France, that 
Gambetta would have attempted to organise it in vain. 
Certain it is, that with all his democratic training, and all 
his democratic habits, his very existence was an antidote 
to democracy. Every great personality, every national 
reputation, every creative political force, is in itself the 
negation of democracy. Democracy, or everybody ruling 
for his day in turn, and in the meantime, till his turn comes, 
furiously assailing every one whose turn is come, is hushed 
into silence by the very existence of a great man. A great 
statesman is ipso facto as fatal to democracy as a great gen- 
eral is incompatible with mutiny. I am not speaking of 



Io8 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

England nor of the English Parliament, where different 
circumstances make different conditions. I am speaking 
of France to-day, and I do not hesitate to say that her one 
chance of good government lies in the hope that her govern- 
ment will assume a personal and not a democratic form. 
By personal I do not mean despotic; certainly not military, 
nothing imperial, not a rule of bayonets, and prisons, and 
exile, and the state of siege ; but the government of a capable 
man or men, freely accepted and followed by the will of an 
intelligent people. In a way we have something of the kind 
here ; in a way they have something of the kind in America. 
The great chance of their having it in France lay in the future 
of Gambetta. I am far from saying that in such a situation 
even he would have succeeded; but his life offered chances 
of such a thing that we look for in vain in France. 

Far be it from me to imply that we should approve of 
all his schemes, or even condone his later policy. I am 
free to acknowledge that of late I have earnestly repudiated 
many leading features of his policy. His attack upon the 
Catholic fraternities, his idea of a state Church, of a state 
education, of state public works, are contrary, I hold it, 
to any just and radical principles; whilst the miserable 
aggression in Tunis, and the criminal spoliation of Egypt, 
fill us with the warmest indignation. For the most part, in 
the last two years, I have found myself more often on the 
side of Cldmenceau, and heartily desirous of seeing the policy 
of Clemenceau succeed. 

But in the one great necessity of France, the formation 
of a governing party or power, perfectly Republican, at 
once progressive and Conservative, I ask myself if Clemen- 
ceau has the prospect of succeeding where Gambetta failed. 
By all means let us support him if prospect there be. But 
I am not sanguine. Clemenceau is so far unable to deal with 



LEON GAMBETTA 



iog 



Democracy, in that he is himself a fanatical adherent of 
the Democratic creed. To him the defeating of any per- 
sonal power is the first duty of a citizen; whereas the for- 
mation of a personal power is the first necessity of the Re- 
public. To him Opportunism is the worst of political 
crimes; whereas Opportunism is simply the basis of all 
true statesmanship. To him, the beginning and end of 
politics is the logical fulfilment of the Revolution; whereas 
the condition of fulfilling the Revolution is to make it the 
gradual development of Order. On all these grounds, 
although on so many a recent question I hold Clemenceau 
right and Gambetta wrong, we would have held to the party 
of Gambetta and not to that of Clemenceau. If we must 
choose between the Irreconcilables and the Opportunists, 
then Opportunism means practical government, and Irrec- 
oncilability means a pedantic doctrine. To have thrown 
over Gambetta for Clemenceau is the very type of the demo- 
cratic frenzy. 1 

The one hope for France is the rise of a great Republican 
chief. And circumstances had so worked that for the mo- 
ment Gambetta was the only possible Republican chief. 
Power in France rests in the hands of some seven or eight 
millions of electors; and these seven or eight millions know 
it, and mean to keep the power. Since the death of Louis 
Napoleon and Thiers, Gambetta's name was the one name 
of living Frenchmen which was known to every one of these 
millions. Grevy's is unknown to one-third of them, per- 
haps; the name of Clemenceau is yet unknown to two- 
thirds of them. The extraordinary events of 1870 had car- 
ried the name and the fame of Gambetta into every cottage 

1 How different a man is the Clemenceau of 1908 from the Clemenceau 
of 1883. Twenty-five years of struggles and defeats, Dreyfus, and sixty- 
seven years of life have turned the Opposition orator into the successful 
statesman (1908). 



110 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

and garret in France. Nothing that Clemenceau, or Grevy, 
or Jules Simon, or Rochefort, or any one of these could do, 
could bring their names or their characters before the mass 
of the electors. The good sense of Grevy, the political 
logic of Clemenceau, are admirable forces; but they can- 
not reach the men who hold the power. They cannot speak 
in the tones which are heard through France; they cannot 
rouse the ideas of the distant sluggish millions. Grevy 
may issue a hundred messages, and Clemenceau may de- 
liver a hundred speeches, but not one word of these will 
reach the dull ear of the herdsmen in the Morbihan, and the 
vinedressers of the Gironde, and the woodcutters of the 
Jura, and the ploughmen of the Beauce. 

But when Gambetta spoke, France heard it and knew 
it, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. The stout 
farmers and the shepherds and the peasants, from the Pas 
de Calais to the Pyrenees, and the workmen of Belleville, 
and of Perrache, and of the Cannebiere, of Lille, and Bor- 
deaux, and Rouen, and Havre — every Frenchman knew 
it and understood it, and, more or less, was moved or influ- 
enced by it. France is politically a bilingual nation. One- 
half speaks a political language, and lives in a political 
world, which is wholly unknown to the other. They who 
address one half of the nation are incomprehensible to the 
other. Gambetta alone of modern Frenchmen was bilingual 
too. He found a language that both understood, and he 
alone could address France. He combined Order and 
Progress — that is, Revolutionary ends and a Conservative 
spirit. Here, then, was the political force. France is a 
Democratic Republic, whose only possible government is 
a popular chief, Revolutionary by his genius and Conserva- 
tive by his instincts. Such an one was Gambetta, and for 
my part I see no other. 



LEON GAMBETTA III 

IV. I pass to the last of the points which remain to notice, 
and my words on this great man, or this great torso of a 
great man, are ended. He is the one European statesman 
of this century who systematically and formally repudiated 
any kind of acceptance of Priesthood. His Opportunist 
theory of a state Church was no doubt as wrong in principle 
as his persecution of the Catholic Orders. But about his 
formal rejection of all theology there can be no doubt; his 
life, his death, his burial, all alike bear witness to it. It is 
common enough with minor politicians of all types in France. 
But when we see the way in which the responsible rulers of 
France have entered into partnership with the priests, when 
we remember all that in that line was done by the Bourbons, 
Napoleons, and Orleans, by men like Guizot and Thiers, 
MacMahon and De Broglie, we see here a new thing — 
a statesman of the first rank in Europe who formally repu- 
diates creeds in any shape, the first ruler of France in this 
century who has chosen to rule on purely human sanctions. 
Had his rejection of theology been simply negative, had he 
been a mere sceptic like Thiers, or an empty scoffer like 
Rochefort, it is little that we should find to honour and 
respect in his secular belief. But the soul of Gambetta 
was not the soul of scoffer or sceptic. He had a religion 
in his soul, though he had neither God nor saint, though 
he never bowed the knee in the temple of Rimmon. His 
religion was France, an imperfect and but narrow image 
indeed of Humanity, but a part of Humanity and an organ 
and an emblem of it. His religious life, like his political 
life, remained but a fragment and a hope. Both have closed 
at the age of forty-four. What a future might have lain 
beyond had he lived to the age of Thiers or Guizot ! 

It is a thing which the world will remember one day — 
that vast ceremony in Paris on the 6th of January last — 



112 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

such a funeral as no emperor ever had, a day that recalled 
the gathering of the dawn of the Revolution in 1789; when 
all France helped to bury the one Frenchman who stood 
before Europe as Bismarck and Gladstone alone of living 
men stand before Europe to-day, and from first to last in 
that throng where Paris did honour to the son of the dealer 
of Cahors, no Catholic emblem or priest was seen; not a 
thought but for the great human loss and human sorrow, 
not a word but of human and earthly hopes. For the first 
time in this century Europe looked on and saw one of its 
foremost men laid in his rest by a nation in grief without priest 
or church, prayer or hymn. 

The nation laid him in his rest with an honour that no 
service could equal. For death is peculiarly the sphere 
of the power and resources of the religion of the future. It 
will find for the last offices of its great sons noble words and 
affecting ceremonies, before which the conventional requiems 
will sound hollow. It will clothe the memory of the great 
man with all the memories of the servants of Humanity, 
whose work he has helped, and whose great company he 
has joined at last. And in the spirit of the immortal tradi- 
tions of patriotic defence, let us remember with honour the 
great citizen who has been borne to the premature grave, 
wherein were laid the unrevealed future of Danton, and 
Hoche, and Condorcet. 



THE MAKING OF ITALY 

(i860) 

The three following studies on the Italian kingdom and its 
makers, Cavour and Garibaldi, were the result of visits 
to Italy and intercourse with the leaders of the National- 
ist cause. At Oxford I had been the friend and pupil 
of Count Aurelio Saffi, one of the Triumvirs at Rome 
with Mazzini and Armellini during the defence of the 
Republic in 1849 under Garibaldi. By Saffi I was 
introduced to Mazzini, Campanella, Pianciani, and 
other Italian exiles, and I travelled in Italy with intro- 
ductions in 1853 an d i855- When the Italian cause 
was taken up by Napoleon III. early in 1859, I took 
deep interest in the question, and wrote letters thereon in 
the Daily News. This brought me into relation with 
Francis Newman, Count Pulszki, the friend of Kossuth, 
G. J. Holyoake, Count Pepoli, and other Italianissimi. 
Meetings took place in my chambers in Lincoln's Inn } 
and we projected the formation of an Italian Association 
to promote the cause by appealing to English sympathy 
in the press and by public meetings and the Trades Unions 
and radical organisations. 

This project was suddenly cut short by Napoleon's 

abandonment of the campaign by the Peace of Villa- 

franca (July 1859). In August I started off to Italy 

with ample introductions, and I undertook to write letters 

1 113 



114 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

to the Morning Post and to the Daily News as indepen- 
dent and honorary correspondent. At Turin I made 
the acquaintance of Senateur Matteucci, Cavour's Flor- 
entine associate, Baron Poerio, the prisoner of Bomba 
in Naples, Count Mamiani, and others. With intro- 
ductions from them I visited Genoa, Leghorn, Florence, 
Siena, Lucca, Prato, Bologna, Ravenna, Modena, Parma, 
Milan, and Lugano, at each place having interviews 
with the local governments of the Duchies — Prince 
Pepoli, Baron Ricasoli, Farini, etc., and the chiefs of 
the Nationalist movement. They furnished me with 
abundant documents and information. I also saw the 
levies of volunteers, and met Garibaldi in Romagna at 
the head of his own corps. The letters I wrote to the 
Morning Post and to the Daily News were studied, I 
understand, by Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, 
then Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary respectively. 
These essays appeared in the Westminster Review, 
January 1861, six months before the death of Cavour 
(1908). 

Impersonated under the great names and the marked 
characters of Cavour and Garibaldi, there stand confronted 
the two principles of policy, the aristocratic and the popular, 
the legal and the revolutionary; and the two great parties 
of order and of movement. Just as the French Revolution 
was, though principally social, yet in a great degree national ; 
so indeed the Italian, though originally national, is in no 
small degree social. The former commenced in the effort 
to substitute one form of society for another, but it ended 
in a struggle for existence with its neighbours. The latter 
commenced a struggle for national existence, which it can- 
not carry to its issue without calling into action many of 



THE MAKING OF ITALY 115 

those elements out of which states are compacted, and facing 
at least some of the difficulties which disturb the union and 
harmony of orders, classes, and institutions. 

On the one side we have seen the action of the Govern- 
ment, or rather of one pre-eminent statesman, moulding 
the material and political strength of a small state into one 
compact power; divergent parties and purposes welded 
into a definite national policy. Next, the action of an estab- 
lished and strong system has been extended to foreign powers, 
and the whole machinery of international statecraft has been 
moved and guided by one strong and practised hand. At 
last, by a consummate stroke of daring and ingenuity, an 
auxiliary of overwhelming strength has been invoked to be 
used, watched, and eventually resisted. Besides which, a 
variety of local revolutions needed to be tempered and guided 
under legal forms and in the presence of retrograde parties ; 
and a work of internecine struggle carried out under the 
jealous eyes of European Governments. The power which 
could do this must above all things have possessed patience, 
tenacity, self-command, experience, and practical sagacity, 
and no small share of those solid qualities out of which grow 
the orderly consolidations of states. Such an element ex- 
isted in the rich and educated classes of Upper Italy, amongst 
the nobility, the landowners, the professions, and the trades 
of the towns ; men who, sometimes pedantic and often over- 
cautious, in the main retained the respect and confidence 
of the people, and to a man were ennobled by the national 
sentiment and zeal for order and rational government. 
Such men, whose services are too much depreciated because 
far from brilliant, formed in reality the strong conservative 
element by which alone the hot passions of the time have 
been mastered and guided; and they found in Cavour an 
exponent and chief who as far surpassed them all in his 



Il6 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

instinct towards systematic and orderly organisation, as in 
his power of grasping and controlling the more vigorous 
forces of the revolutionary element. 

On the other side we have seen the conception of national 
existence matured and upheld through dreary years of suffer- 
ing by a few brilliant intellects, gradually growing up as 
the religion of the finer minds, until it at last spread to be 
the passion of all that is generous in the national character. 
With them it became a principle too sacred to be tampered 
with, too vital to suffer excuse or delay, which demanded 
every sacrifice and was capable of every achievement. These 
ardent spirits addressed and found response in the hearts 
of the people; they repudiated the course of diplomatic 
intrigue as much as that of cautious legality. Believing 
more in enthusiasm than in organisation, and in self-devo- 
tion than in ability, they are impatient of the delays and 
scruples of the party of order. Devoted to their principle 
of national regeneration, they contemn those social influ- 
ences which unless in moments of extraordinary excitement 
virtually dominate and represent every society. They thus 
quite misconceive and undervalue the weight bearing upon 
the future of their country from the will or policy of foreign 
states, as well as that of the rich, educated, or powerful 
individuals at home. With feelings which in every great 
crisis do indeed make the life of national movements, they 
had neither the patience nor the judgment necessary for 
sustained preparation, or for handling complicated situa- 
tions and rival parties. Besides which, they have so little 
sympathy for those sentiments, interests, or habits, upon 
which the order and obedience of masses of men repose, 
that they force their own enthusiastic ideas upon popula- 
tions quite incapable of adopting them, and govern alter- 
nately with untimely violence and fatal negligence. 



THE MAKING OF ITALY 117 

Such are the elements which have been at work during 
the whole of this recent Italian movement, occasionally 
acting harmoniously as one, then separately but in common, 
at times in open hostility; but both indispensable and both 
inevitable. Cavour and Garibaldi, the leaders of these 
two parties, are not, however, their simple representatives. 
To all the habitual self-restraint, the knowledge and patient 
training of the Conservative classes, Cavour adds the full 
power of conceiving and using the enthusiasm of popular 
feeling. But with all his superiority to his own order and 
party, he does not and cannot inspire in others that passionate 
love of national existence, that moral elevation of character, 
that unfaltering self-devotion and perfect simplicity, which 
seem to beam from the countenance of the great popular 
hero. With his admirable versatility, sagacity, and know- 
ledge of mankind, the great minister has been able to con- 
duct with consummate skill an undertaking as great and 
difficult as ever fell to the lot of a statesman. But the very 
ability of his combinations and devices, the very brilliancy 
of his achievements, have proved in no small degree fatal to 
the moral strength of his position. He has mixed himself 
up in compromises and intrigues, and in deceptions which, 
however excusable in a politician, are fatal to the honour 
of a great national regenerator. 

The services of Cavour to his country have been indeed 
indispensable; without him neither the first possibility of 
life, nor the actual maintenance of existence, would have 
been practicable; but he is not all, and he needed a very 
different colleague. All that is wanting in Cavour is sup- 
plied in Garibaldi. Utterly incapable of civil administra- 
tion as the noble soldier has proved, he has inspired in the 
heart of every Italian emotions which no Government orator 
or diplomatist could awaken. When a ministry had com- 



Il8 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

pleted a bargain which nothing but necessity (yet unproved) 
could excuse, the voice of the bravest of the brave was heard 
in the council of the nation choked with shame and indigna- 
tion. That broken protest sank deep into the hearts of the 
people ; it taught them to rely on their own sense of dignity, 
and not on the hired favours of strangers. Again, when the 
enthusiasm of the nation was sinking under the chilling 
process of consolidation and diplomatic manoeuvring, the 
same voice aroused them to a sense of the task still before 
them, and awoke the stifled cry of national reunion. By 
him the sense of public honour and pride, wounded to the 
quick by a humiliating sacrifice, was again called into activ- 
ity. By him also the desire of national existence has been 
raised from a line of policy into a sacred duty, and patriotism 
has been elevated into a religion by which interest, habit, 
and personal ambition are to be transformed and disappear. 
Lastly, it was the Dictator alone who could give to the regen- 
eration of Italy that character of brotherly reunion, of moral 
purification, of popular simplicity and intensity, which were 
little dreamt of in the Cabinet, the Court, or the Parliament. 
Their country needed both. Each had his own great 
part to bear in the contest. It has not fallen to the lot of 
Italy to unite in one party, as in our own Revolution, the 
most fiery enthusiasm with the sternest discipline, or to 
create a leader who, like Cromwell, could be at once the 
devotee of a sacred cause and the consummate politician. 
With them, principle and policy have had a separate repre- 
sentative, and the claims of neither one nor the other should 
be exaggerated or undervalued. The passion of the soldier 
has been curbed by the providence of the statesman, whilst 
the skill of the minister has been ennobled by the energy of 
a hero. Without Garibaldi, the intensity no less than the 
character of the popular feeling was in danger of being lost ; 



THE MAKING OF ITALY H9 

had he been master, it would have been ruined in futile enter- 
prises. As in every regular act, heart and mind must con- 
cur, the one to suggest, the other to control; so it has been 
the duty of the hero to inspire, of the statesman to guide the 
popular effort. That which the one felt, the other thought; 
the instinct of one has been matured by the experience of 
the other. The one has made his country respected, the 
other has made it honoured ; the one has increased its power, 
the other has elevated its character. Arm and head, heart 
and brain, feeling and intelligence, may be contrasted, but 
cannot be separated without danger. It may not be possible, 
or even desirable, exactly to decide the share which each 
may have had in a common work; but it would be a pro- 
found mistake to exalt one service at the expense of the other, 
when both are indispensable. 

In judging Cavour we are impressed by that in which he 
surpasses all modern statesmen — the faculty of prevision. 
In this, pre-eminently the first duty of a politician, the pres- 
ent century has shown no example at all comparable. 1 In 
him alone shall we find anything like a systematic and patient 
elaboration of a great national object. There, at least, we 
have an instance of a Government far ahead of its people, 
creating and directing an active public opinion towards one 
object, and subjecting the whole of its action to the slow 
work of preparing for a distant and gigantic enterprise. For 
ten years now the whole public action of Piedmont — mate- 
rial, political, and moral, in foreign as well as domestic 
policy; in Parliament as in Cabinet, from one end to the 
other of the public service — has been centred in the effort 

1 In i860 Bismarck was ambassador at St. Petersburg, estranged from 
the Prussian ministry and little known outside diplomatic circles. Of 
course he ultimately made an even grander career. But his work was 
neither so difficult, nor so honourable, nor so sagacious as that of Cavour 
(1908). 



120 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

to prepare for that part which she has lately been called on 
to perform. It was from the joint action of all these means 
— by diplomacy, by public opinion, by material organisa- 
tion, by attention to the finances, the army, the railways, 
the schools, the ecclesiastical bodies, and the civil service 
of the nation, that Count Cavour has looked for the success 
of his undertaking. 

The history of his administration affords a complete in- 
stance of a statesman who works out a profound policy with 
unfailing sagacity and determination. The details of man- 
agement have been no less admirable than the scheme itself. 
The perfect publicity and distinctness of the object sought, 
and the harmony with which all developments of national 
activity fell into the grand purpose, is the best proof of the 
soundness and vitality of the policy. No other could afford 
any basis for sustained and combined action. Such a type 
of Government belongs, indeed, more to the past times in 
which States have been created, than to these latter days, 
in which they are feebly or carelessly governed. It contains 
nothing of that irregular and incoherent movement which, 
since the French Revolution, has marked more or less the 
European ministries. To carry a few popular measures, 
to provide for the wants or dangers of the present, to under- 
take or surrender a course of action under the sway of public 
opinion, to assume in Europe that position which for the 
moment seemed most conducive to the national prestige, 
has been the crown of the aims of any modern ministry. 

The work accomplished by Count Cavour belongs rather 
to that order of statesmanship which has created nations, 
changed the future history of Europe, and consolidated new 
eras of social and political life. For the true parallels or 
rivals to him, we must look, not amongst the Palmerstons or 
Talleyrands, or even the Peels or Guizots of our day, but 



THE MAKING OF ITALY 121 

amongst the company of William of Orange, of Frederick II., 
and George Washington. Not that he in any great degree 
resembles any of these great men ; he may not equal some of 
them in moral elevation of character, though undoubtedly 
his mental capacities are not wholly unequal to theirs. But 
it is to the class of great creative statesmen, and not to that 
of able administrators or consummate diplomatists, that he 
belongs. It is not from such men that we can look for the 
organisation of all the conflicting principles and forces in a 
highly cultivated nation, and the formation of a great living 
whole out of the scattered fragments of an oppressed race. 
It is a peculiar genius for government which can grasp as a 
central idea that one principle of action which can alone 
give cohesion and vitality to disorganised communities, can 
make it practical enough for the most unenlightened, and 
broad enough for the most aspiring; and at the same time 
develop it in action under all the restraints imposed by pre- 
scription and the sluggishness which timidity and selfishness 
impose on large classes of mankind. The conception of 
national unity is indeed primarily due to those impassioned 
thinkers of all schools who upheld the sacred tradition of the 
Italian race, and in perhaps the highest degree to that un- 
happy genius who was himself the least capable of creating it. 
To Mazzini, it is true, as thinker, poet, preacher, or agita- 
tor — as indeed anything short of politician — is due in this 
generation the strength of that principle which is the very 
life of Italy at this day. But however we admit his claims 
as a teacher, which as a conspirator he has done so much 
to nullify, it is clear that had not Cavour found means to 
make that notion of Italian nationality patent to the mind 
of all Europe, and made it a practical and intelligible creed 
to all classes of Italians, forcing the principle forward under 
a constant shield of order and right, the very idea itself would 



122 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

long have remained in the breasts of the small circle of noble 
and intelligent spirits. It is not by eloquent appeals or by 
desperate self-sacrifice that the mass of the public can be 
penetrated. It has been the task of Count Cavour, by a 
long series of public acts, all within the sphere of sound and 
legal administration, to awaken in the minds of the great 
body of his countrymen a sense of national right, duty, and 
dignity, and to conciliate the spirit of freedom with that of 
subordination to one powerful will. 

The difficulties which met Cavour on his first accession 
to power were such as even now it is difficult thoroughly to 
estimate. The defeat of Novara had left the Piedmontese 
kingdom humiliated and weakened, and yet fatally impli- 
cated in the insurrectionary movement which each succeed- 
ing event in Europe contributed to discredit. There the 
Church and a semi-feudal landed aristocracy possessed a 
strong traditional power. The whole of the administration 
of the little state was singularly backward and imperfect. 
Its legal and its commercial system, its municipal institu- 
tions, the organisation of its army, of education, of the pub- 
lic service, and of religious bodies, its tariff, its roads, and 
system of communication, and lastly, its own national unity, 
were below those of nearly every other state in the Peninsula, 
except the Roman itself. In the other provinces of Italy, 
monarchical sentiments had not begun to exist, and national 
greatness was known only in the language of insurrectionary 
appeals. All the sad honours of the late campaign had been 
won by the old municipal spirit, and Manin and Garibaldi 
had upheld the glory of historic republics. The strength 
with which upon the shattered efforts of the national uprising 
the old empire of the foreigner had been established, had 
crushed out all but the hope of feeble palliatives and evasions 
in the minds of the more cautious, and desperate conspiracies 



THE MAKING OF ITALY 1 23 

in those of the bolder. Parties were swaying between hope- 
less submission and hopeless rebellion, amidst a state of 
things in Europe which seemed at each step to be extinguish- 
ing the last embers of revolution. By degrees two distinct 
courses of action became visible, and two rival parties made 
their existence felt. 

The constitutional or moderate party adopted one; the 
party of action or the national party the other. It has been 
the work of Cavour to vivify and fuse the two. On the one 
hand, the party which comprised the rich and noble classes, 
the more timid natures, and the bulk of the commercial 
public, bowed down by the great calamity of the last effort, 
preached against any new risk or immediate action, looked 
only for the future to the action of time and increased in- 
telligence in the people, and hoped by patient conduct and 
ingenious management to alleviate rather than extinguish 
the national degradation whenever the circumstances of the 
day or the public opinion of Europe offered an opportunity. 
Violently denouncing all extreme measures, and resolute to 
expose themselves to no fresh disaster, they hoped to amelio- 
rate the position of their country by legal resistance, and by 
the means of those liberal institutions which survived the 
wreck, by appealing to the public opinion and Governments 
of Europe, and in particular by the introduction of a par- 
liamentary system. Opposed to this was the policy of the 
revolutionary party, who, having their headquarters at Milan, 
possessed no insignificant strength both at Genoa and Turin. 
Under this head belong all those parties, whether republi- 
can or monarchist, who looked forward to insurrection as the 
means of restitution, and laboured by conspiracies, associa- 
tions, and propagandism towards the freedom of the Italian 
race by a general explosion of revolutionary energy. 

This party indeed was animated by a far deeper devotion 



124 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

to the common cause, and felt more deeply the miseries of 
the present, than the supporters of the more patient and 
cooler policy. They felt indeed the immense necessity for 
action, and unhesitating confidence in the capacity of their 
race. They saw, moreover, the grand truth that all the 
patience and prudence of their rivals never would result in 
creating that deep national enthusiasm which alone could 
produce a restored nation ; and that the future of their coun- 
try could no longer be left to ministerial ingenuity, but must 
be made the first and last of public duties. 

Standing as we do upon the pedestal of past events, we 
can now discern that neither one policy nor the other sepa- 
rately had a chance of success. With all their efforts towards 
material and domestic advancement, with their old ideas of 
regular and peaceful efforts, the moderates could never have 
awakened the sentiment of national reunion, or forced upon 
Piedmont the danger and the glory of the national chieftain- 
ship. They possessed no means and little taste for reach- 
ing the popular sympathies, and were devoid of all conception 
of a social regeneration as bound up in the national revival. 
Nor could their doctrines attract the nobler spirits or the 
finer intellects, whilst they compromised with the great end 
of all political life. Under their system Piedmont might 
have gone on for years increasing in ignoble prosperity, dis- 
tinguished from Belgium or Holland by a finer army or a 
nobler soil. 

Nor did the bare programme of the revolutionists offer a 
more fortunate career. The long series of disastrous insur- 
rections into which the unhappy illusions of Mazzini led his 
generous but credulous followers, seems to prove beyond all 
doubt the impossibility of really organising a national insur- 
rection in a country so thoroughly shackled with the sanction 
of every Government in Europe. Their appeal to the spirit 



THE MAKING OF ITALY 1 25 

of their countrymen, whilst it does honour to the sincerity 
of their own devotion, shows but too sadly how much they 
had mistaken the vis inertiae of the bulk of the people. And 
if to be alway ■ fancying a passion for national independence 
in masses of the country population, to whom the very name 
of Italy was a word without meaning or sense, were not 
enough to condemn them as politicians, it was a fatal delu- 
sion to be preaching insurrection to a people amongst whom 
the rich and the noble held the paramount social and political 
influence, classes who by the very conditions of their existence 
must resent with indignation any suggestion or attempt 
towards revolutionary or social convulsion. Had such a 
party succeeded in establishing their supremacy, the future 
of the Italian race would have sunk more hopelessly at each 
successive disaster which they had provoked. Outcasts at 
once from all the conservative elements of their nation, and 
hunted down by its oppressors, they would have served only 
to renew continual protests ever to be extinguished in blood. 
Discarding, it seems despising, that material strength and 
organisation which they did not, and could not possess, and 
attributing to the moral strength which they had an extent 
which was wholly delusive, they could do little but keep alive 
a sacred principle which they were incapable of making 
triumphant. Each insurrection would have ended in fresh 
physical suffering and deeper moral prostration. Had Italy 
possessed no sons but them, they might have been now 
wandering over Europe like the Poles, and showing us that 
Italian nationality existed only in the minds of the thoughtful 
and the ardent as a tradition or an aspiration. 

It has been the task of Count Cavour to bring about the 
fusion of these two parties, each of which maintained an idea 
which was indispensable to real success. The party of order 
saw the necessity for regular and patient development of the 



126 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

national resources; the party of action the duty of rousing 
the popular energy. From the one he took their notion of 
the end, from the other their view of the method of national 
policy. With the one he adopted as his watchword the unity 
and independence of Italy, with the other he proclaimed as 
his policy the regular and public reorganisation of the state. 
With the one he saw that no genuine progress was possible, 
unless by accepting the conditions of the political and social 
system existing; with the other he insisted that all political 
and material development must be animated by a leading 
principle, and subordinated to one paramount duty. 

Seen from a distance, his Government presents itself to us 
as one series of sagacious yet aspiring enterprises. With 
every fresh success he has risen in audacity and vigour, until 
we have seen at last the revolutionary energy of the outlaw 
matched by that of the responsible minister. He has shown, 
indeed, that a great revolution can be carried out without a 
reckless use of convulsive measures, but not without rising 
to a true conception of all the forces in society which under- 
lie its external forms and laws. He has carried out the work 
of Italian nationality by repudiating, on the one hand, the 
desperate aid of mere insurrection, but on the other not with- 
out boldly advancing on the path of organic revolution. 

Cavour 

The career of Count Cavour exhibits the somewhat un- 
usual case of a politician who grows less and not more con- 
servative by experience. His progress has been one from 
unobtrusive administrative and economic studies to the 
conduct of astounding revolutionary movements. First he 
is the industrious writer on financial operations, then the 
minister of material and political reforms, lastly the leader of 



CAVOUR 127 

a nation in a struggle for existence. There was little in his 
early life to foreshadow the formidable character in which 
he now appears. 

Almost the first act which it fell to his duty to carry out, 
the commercial treaty with France, was an emblem of his 
whole subsequent system. By that treaty, indeed, Pied- 
mont surrendered far more advantages than she obtained; 
but she obtained from it the priceless gain of the foundation 
of a French alliance. In the words in which the minister 
defended his policy in Parliament we have indeed the key 
of his whole career, a reorganisation of the whole strength of 
the country to be combined with foreign alliances as the basis 
of a national war. "To this treaty," said he, "we are moved 
by considerations superior to any economical or administra- 
tive interest. A crisis may yet, and probably will soon arise 
in which Sardinia might need, if not the material, at least the 
moral support of France. This treaty may not give us all 
the financial advantages which we have a right to expect, 
but it will strengthen that precious union which ought to 
exist between the free peoples of the west of Europe." It 
was the same idea to which belong all those commercial 
treaties which marked the year 185 1, with Belgium, England, 
Switzerland, Greece, the Zollverein, and Holland. By them, 
together with the second convention with France, an entire 
revolution was introduced in the fiscal system of the king- 
dom, and Piedmont took her place as a Free Trade state in 
a manner to which no other Continental power could pretend. 
The sagacity of these measures has indeed been amply proved 
by an increased and increasing revenue; by the stimulus 
given to production, and the development of material 
prosperity. 

But it is to take a very narrow view of his policy to suppose 
that it was as a free-trader, or economist, that Count Cavour 



128 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

carried out these measures. They are political no less than 
commercial measures. Their prime object was to introduce 
Sardinia as the equal of the enlightened and progressive 
states of Europe, to ensure the moral support, if not the 
actual alliance, of France and England, to raise the country 
up out of the catalogue of obscure or satellite kingdoms, and 
invest her in the eyes of her citizens and of all Italians with 
a European dignity and importance. 

Nor was this idea less conspicuous in any of those ad- 
ministrative reforms under which the whole organisation of 
the country has so marvellously expanded. That system of 
railways which is now the completest which any Continental 
state can show, if not quite so thickly set as the Belgian or 
the English, possesses a symmetry and a common design 
which show the work of a dominant purpose directing their 
whole extent. There is something quite strategic in their 
plan, and we see them laid out as in the array of an army 
with a first and second line of defence ; a double communi- 
cation between the strong stations, and a general concentra- 
tion of the whole. And the providence and value of this 
work was abundantly manifested in the recent campaign, 
where we saw Turin saved from invasion, and gigantic 
manoeuvres executed by the sole agency of this new engine 
of war. 

It is again to the same general policy that so many of the 
other labours of that ministry belong : the postal conventions 
with the other states of Italy, by means of which Pied- 
montese journals and information penetrated the Peninsula ; 
the reconstruction and reorganisation of the mercantile and 
naval ports, the reform of the finances, of the banks, the 
reassessment of the land-tax. Finally came that by which 
the ministerial policy was to find its weapon — the entire 
reorganisation of the army, and the systematic armament of 



CAVOUR I29 

the fortresses which formed the key of the internal defence. 
It was by this series of administrative reforms, and the energy 
and sagacity displayed in such repeated instances of sound 
practical statesmanship, that the great bulk of the nation 
gradually came to place its confidence in a minister who had 
so strikingly increased the prosperity and activity of the 
country. But if the policy of Count Cavour had rested there, 
he might have been the organ of the Conservative classes, 
without ever becoming the chief of the active energy of the 
progressive. It was necessary to assume an attitude which 
could arrest the imagination and appeal to the heart of the 
bulk of the nation, Italian as well as Piedmontese. He 
must proclaim a principle which could really enlist that 
smouldering but irresistible force of resistance, and unite 
in one battle-cry the unguided will of thousands of ardent 
spirits. To satisfy and to restrain the passionate hopes of 
men to whom fear and despair were unknown, and soothe 
the heaving agitation of overgoaded populations, needed 
some more powerful engine than financial arrangements or 
amended tariffs. 1 

To exist, Piedmont must head the revolution. It was this 
which none of the leading men of the country seemed ade- 
quately to conceive. It was this which has been the basis 
of Cavour's policy. Slowly he began to announce a more 
energetic system. 

The diplomatic struggle with Austria in defence of the 
Lombard exiles whose property had been sequestered, first 
exhibited him in the arena of European politics, and gave 
its true stamp to his policy. Then Italians for the first time 
saw the audacity and skill with which the minister could meet 
the high-handed violence of the great Empire. When after 

1 It will be remembered that the whole of these remarks applies to the 
condition of Itay in i860 (1908). 



130 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the failure (at least outwardly) of the most powerful appeals 
and protests to Austria, the Sardinian envoy was withdrawn 
from Vienna, the full significance of the struggle became 
manifest. It was a great step thus to have met the common 
enemy with a defiance, and to have pronounced before the 
public opinion of Europe a crushing indictment, and car- 
ried off the approval of the Governments of England and 
France. 

But there was an enemy at home yet nearer than the 
Austrian whom it was necessary to humble and defy. Whilst 
the Papal Church retained its prestige and organisation, the 
union and independence of Italy were alike impossible. 

Rome yet possessed the strength to impede every step 
towards national greatness, and the strength of Rome lay in 
the monastic orders. It is a singular fact that during the 
provisional regime in Tuscany and the Duchies of Central 
Italy, the feelings of the clergy, and with them of the rural 
populations, were seen to vary exactly in proportion to the 
numbers and power of the monastic bodies. To strike down 
and shatter this priestly army was the object achieved with 
entire success by the conventual legislation by which all 
orders not engaged in preaching, teaching, or healing were 
suppressed. By this measure the Papacy was humiliated 
and its strength crippled. The rapidity, firmness, and mod- 
eration with which this great social change was effected 
(unattended by any of those evils which have too often fol- 
lowed upon such an act), showed the minister superintending 
without a single failure a real revolution in society, and con- 
ciliating the strict claims of law, property, and order with 
a scheme involving a most organic change and kindling 
opposite passions. 

Neither the fury of the Catholic party nor the excitement 
of their extreme opponents could shake the Government from 



CAVOUR I31 

its policy of long-matured advance. The part which this 
measure alone has played in the recent agitation towards 
annexation to Sardinia is very remarkable. Both sides feel 
its significance, and the resolution and boldness displayed in 
it by the ministry as much added to their strength as the 
senile anathemas of the Vatican exposed and degraded the 
Catholic party. 

The material strength of the country having been thus 
raised to the highest efficiency, and the domestic enemies 
effectually subdued, Count Cavour was prepared to enter 
upon that branch of his policy which involved the active 
co-operation of the European Powers. The war against 
Russia offered the means, and even made necessary immedi- 
ate action. The opportunity was given of at once entering 
into the circle of the European states, whilst the late outbreak 
at Milan, and the evident excitement of the republican party, 
proved the danger of a policy of inaction. Count Cavour 
accordingly offered to the allies the vigorous co-operation of 
the Sardinian state, and despatched a force which nearly 
equalled and at one time exceeded that of the British army. 
By this enterprise the ambition and self-reliance of the army 
were awakened, great impulse was given to its organisation 
and strength, the disaster of Novara was blotted out, and the 
credit of Piedmont again placed beyond a rival in Italy. 

It was by its indirect rather than by its direct consequences 
that this measure must be judged. The alliance with Eng- 
land and France, by which the Sardinian territories were 
actually guaranteed during the war, and which promised 
for many years the closest relations, at once raised the little 
kingdom into a European Power. The moral effect of the 
protest, uttered at the Congress of Paris, formed a real step 
in the history of Italy ; nor was the language of the minister 
in the Parliament other than was justified by facts: "From 



132 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

henceforth the Italian question has entered on the order of 
European questions. The cause of Italy has been main- 
tained, not by demagogues and revolutionaries, but by the 
plenipotentiaries of France and England. From the Con- 
gress it has passed to the tribunal of public opinion. The 
struggle will be long, and needs prudence and calmness ; but 
our cause will triumph." 

Indeed the state papers which that occasion drew forth 
before the public attention of Europe, were such as pos- 
sessed no ordinary significance. That presented to the allied 
Powers in April 1856, by the vigour of its attack, by its un- 
answerable logic, and still more by the perfect moderation 
of its tone, could not fail to place the Italian question in a 
new light, and force upon the most conservative minds in 
Europe the necessity for acquiescing in important change. 
The conflict waged in the field as well as that in the council 
sank deeply into the minds of the whole Italian race, the 
former chiefly into that of the people, the latter into the con- 
victions of thinking men. And if in the recent elevation of 
Sardinia to the chieftainship of the nation, we see the influ- 
ence of the glory of the Crimean campaign, we see in it no 
less the impression caused on the more vigorous of the older 
parties by the attitude which the kingdom had assumed in 
the councils of Europe. This it was that gave the minister 
the support of the republican and purely revolutionary chiefs. 
Now they saw opening to them a real prospect of achieving 
by some not distant effort the entire emancipation of the 
country with the sanction and even the co-operation of some 
of the European Powers. Then they began to see the real 
drift of a policy which looked forward to national inde- 
pendence, not by setting up Piedmont as a fortunate model 
for imitation or an example of prudent resignation, but by 
training her whole energies for the hour of national struggle, 



CAVOUR I33 

and preparing the way for success by a hearty co-opera- 
tion of parties and long-sighted combination of European 
policy. 

With regard to this participation of Piedmont in the 
Crimean War very opposite judgments have been formed. 
It may be said with much force that to declare war with a 
friendly Power which menaced no possible right or interest 
of the state, to burden the struggling resources of the coun- 
try with a new and indefinite weight, to have rushed unpro- 
voked into the midst of a gigantic struggle; in a word, to 
have undertaken a distant war for the sole purpose of de- 
riving therefrom glory and alliances, was an act of very 
doubtful prudence, and of hardly doubtful morality. 

Right or wrong, the war resulted almost as a necessity from 
the part which Sardinia had undertaken. To maintain her 
very existence and tranquillity she was forced to show her- 
self prepared for a speedy struggle with the Austrian — to 
enter upon that struggle with a chance of success she needed 
at least the moral support of the Western Powers — and that 
support she could not hope to obtain unless by boldly identi- 
fying herself with their foreign European policy. The Lom- 
bard campaign was only possible after the Congress of Paris, 
and admission to the Congress would have been impossible 
had it not been for the victory on the Tchernaia. It may be 
that the task of national regeneration is one which after all 
the sword is not competent to effect; but so far as force or 
policy could effect it, the work has been most thoroughly 
successful, and if the Crimean expedition was one which by 
itself has no adequate justification of right, it has been at 
least gilded over by amazing results, and received a certain 
consecration from the cause which it has so incalculably 
served. 

The work hitherto had been one only of preparation for 



134 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the struggle. The time was come for the actual effort. The 
aid of France was sought, and obtained. Nothing could be 
a greater mistake than to regard the interference of France 
as the result of an individual impulse of the Emperor, or any 
special manoeuvre of the minister. It is bound up with the 
whole system of Count Cavour's policy, of which it forms the 
crown. By it that policy must stand or fall. With reference 
to that his public acts must be explained and judged. Immi- 
nent as that French intervention was in 1848, with the whole 
course of events leading up to it over a period of ten years, 
popular as the object of the war was in France, it must be 
looked on even more as the issue of the situation of affairs 
in Europe than of any individual will, however powerful and 
apparently capricious, and as having justified the sagacity of 
Lord Palmerston, who wrote in November 1848, "The glory 
of delivering Italy to the Alps from the Austrian yoke will 
compensate, in the eyes of the French people, many sacri- 
fices and great efforts. The opportunity for invoking French 
intervention in Italy will not long be wanting. The Lom- 
bards would be ready to furnish it directly they knew that 
the Government and people of France were disposed to 
answer the call. It is hardly possible to imagine that an 
Austrian army could resist a numerous and powerful French 
army, seconded and supported by a general rising of the 
Italians." In any case, such an alliance was the consum- 
mation of the policy of Count Cavour. Under his hands 
Piedmont had undertaken to solve the national difficulty. 
She was, indeed, impelled to it by a fatal necessity to preserve 
at once her independence, her tranquillity, and her throne. 
Had not, indeed, the upper classes under their noble chief 
placed themselves at the head of the national movement, 
their power would in a few years have been wrenched from 
them by the party of the revolution to renew the policy and 



CAVOUR 135 

disaster of Novara. What, then, were the means by which 
the end was to be obtained ? 

The last campaign has proved how utterly powerless 
would have been the most desperate efforts of Sardinia alone 
against the entire force of Austria. Nor were we to add to 
these efforts, as the revolutionary party insist, the insurrec- 
tion throughout Italy; it is not easy to assert that it would 
have improved the chances of national success. This could 
not escape the eye of the man who had evoked and weighed 
the resources of his country, whilst he repudiates, and per- 
haps undervalues, the power of insurrection. He was forced 
then to look for some external assistance ; nor is it conceiv- 
able that he could have persisted in a long course of provoca- 
tion and defiance of the common enemy with the ultimate 
intention of commencing war with no forces but the compact 
army of the king, and the desultory fury of unarmed popula- 
tions. Such an idea is as much contradicted by the character 
of the man, as by the whole history of his acts. Some ex- 
ternal aid was indispensable. It presented itself only in two 
forms. 

Italy might meet Austria either with the assistance of one 
or more of the Western Powers, or might wait until she was 
a prey to the mortal throes of revolution within. Even now, 
as we witness the slow dissolution of that tenacious power 
struggling so long after a death-wound, we cannot fail to see 
that to have waited for that crisis might have been to wait 
until safety, honour, and self-respect had been lost at home. 
Each fresh act of provocation thrust Sardinia nearer to the 
inevitable conflict, and necessitated a still bolder act to con- 
firm and extend the prestige of the last. Sardinia was forced 
by an irresistible power to advance incessantly upon a path 
where success was only possible at the price of invoking the 
assistance of the foreigner. To have relied, as the revolu- 



136 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

tionary party insist, upon the unaided strength of Italy, 
means simply to have submitted to an internal revolution as 
a preparation, and to have established a democratic republic 
upon the ruins of all those conservative elements of the coun- 
try, and of the consolidation of the social system, out of which 
alone, as we conceive, permanent success was possible. 
Italia far a da se was the watchword of Mazzini at the open- 
ing of the war. But the very weapon with which, as he con- 
ceives, she ought to fight — the insurrection after the model 
of the year 1793 — involves the previous suppression of the 
whole force of the upper classes, to whom such a weapon 
is abhorrent and self-destructive. 

To the Western Powers, then, or more distinctly to France, 
Count Cavour directed his hopes. Hazardous as the cast 
was, it cannot be proved to have been desperate. All those 
advantages which it seemed to offer have been obtained from 
it ; and very few of the evils which were foretold have come 
to pass. He cannot be said to have conjured a spirit which 
he was unable to control or to resist ; nor can any reasonable 
mind assert that the loss of Nice counterbalances the crea- 
tion of Italy. It may be that the recent war has not ade- 
quately solved the difficulty. The assistance of France may 
have produced a moral injury to the future of Italy. But 
all such evils were involved in any possible course of active 
effort. No conceivable policy, in such a case, could have 
been without its own inherent defect. It may be that the 
European statesman, or even the Italian patriot, might de- 
plore the intervention of France ; but it would be preposter- 
ous to condemn a great practical politician from seizing the 
only available engine of acting on the immediate destinies 
of his country. 

The assistance of the foreigner having been decided upon, 
the task before Count Cavour was to direct the Italian revo- 



CAVOUR 137 

lution by means of conservative authorities, and with the 
least possible risk of political or social convulsion, and at 
the same time to call out the whole warlike energy of the 
nation. It must be admitted that he succeeded far better 
in the former than in the latter portion of his duty. The 
liberated populations exhibited indeed far more sagacity 
than energy, and finally achieved their freedom by a fortu- 
nate deficiency of vehemence and excitement. It cannot be 
doubted that an almost suspicious reliance was placed upon 
order and diplomacy. The fact is that the whole conduct 
of the movement had been placed in the hands of the recog- 
nised heads of the social system, and was left to the upper 
classes to direct by skill without any admixture of revolu- 
tionary convulsion. This was especially obvious in Tuscany 
(which was but a type of the other provisional Governments), 
where the entire guidance was placed in the hands of a real 
aristocracy of birth and wealth, of men possessing the lead- 
ing territorial and social influence in the country, full of 
the conservative instincts of an educated and historic order, 
and united by long study, and an almost pedantic trust in 
the machinery of orderly and systematic government. 

Such as the Tuscan rulers were, such were the Parmesan, 
the Modenese, and the Bolognese, in a greater or less degree ; 
and the whole of these governments were created under the 
influence, and in most cases by the direct act, of Count 
Cavour, and were even after his fall inspired mainly by his 
counsels, and held together by the National Society which 
was the organ and promoter of his peculiar views and policy. 
The exigencies of the situation had all been foreseen and 
provided for by the minister, and he relied for the success of 
the revolution to be accomplished under the shield of France 
exclusively to the strength, authority, and ability of the con- 
servative and wealthy classes, assisted by all the educated 



138 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

intelligence which they could command. It is true that but 
for a bolder and less far-sighted effort, the population of 
Central Italy might have sunk from want of military energy 
and enthusiasm; but it is not the less true that the whole 
attitude, sobriety, and pertinacity of the resistance they made 
to the Peace of Villafranca was directly due to the sagacity 
of the statesman who had placed the direction of a revolu- 
tion in the hands of men who belonged to the party of order 
by instinct, position, and education. 

More recent events have shown Count Cavour assuming 
a bolder attitude, and earning almost the name of a revolu- 
tionary leader. The connivance in the attempt of Garibaldi, 
and the invasion and annexation of the Papal and Neapolitan 
territories, belong wholly to the policy of a man who had 
risen to a full sense of a critical situation. The manner in 
which he has used, aided, and then controlled Garibaldi; 
the skill with which the republican energy has been let loose, 
to be at the very moment of destruction reined in and paci- 
fied; the audacity with which a startling onslaught was 
made upon the Head of the National Church, and a friendly 
monarch attacked and besieged, without on the one hand 
calling forth revolutionary passions, or on the other the hos- 
tility of jealous foreign Powers, is undoubtedly a proof of 
political aptitude, such as makes the turning-point in the 
destinies of a nation. In these later enterprises the true 
force of the statesman's capacity is seen, for they exhibit him 
as the chief of a revolution of which he has hitherto appeared 
mainly as the controller. 

Schemes such as these belong to those exceptional crises 
in which a statesman must rise above the rules of prudence, 
legality, and moderation, or be irretrievably lost, and act, if 
he acts at all, in a full consciousness that the safety of the 
people is above all law. It is by such acts throughout his- 



CAVOUR 139 

tory that the existence of nations has been preserved by men 
who have broken through at once all the habits, traditions, 
and laws of society, under the overwhelming duty of the 
salvation of the nation. Men will always be found to object 
to Cromwell violations of the constitution; to Danton sup- 
pression of law ; to William the Silent duplicity and intrigue : 
but politicians must be judged by their power of commanding 
the crisis in which they are placed, and the average of their 
good and evil must be struck by the practical necessities of 
their task. On any politician who dares to violate constitu- 
tions, laws, or treaties, the heaviest responsibility must weigh, 
to be removed alone by the verdict of history and the con- 
scientious sanction of public opinion. 

Beneath the logic of pedants and fanatics, the public in- 
stinct feels that the law of nations in no true sense could 
apply between the provincial states of Italy, or govern rela- 
tions which rest on a condition of virtual revolution and war. 
When the Sardinian armies invaded the Marches and Umbria 
they invaded the states of a power with whom they had long 
been waging a deadly but informal war. When they hunted 
the Neapolitan pretender to his last retreat, they were only 
crushing an outcast tyrant and driving forth an incendiary 
partisan. Legal pedantry and hypocritical formalism apart, 
it is true that Count Cavour has the right to say, "We are 
Italy ! we act in her name." The judgment of free nations 
has welcomed that which does indeed bear the outward form 
of the triumph of might over right, and the hopes of order 
and national independence have been raised high by these 
acts of violent invasion. Yet not the less must we feel ad- 
miration for the sagacity and courage of a policy which so 
far transcends the regions in which ordinary statesmen 
dwell, and belongs to the extraordinary efforts of decisive 
emergencies. 



140 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Count Cavour is a politician of that high order which unites 
the most opposite qualities, and resumes in himself the vari- 
ous forces of an era. He embodies the cause of monarchy, 
order, and constitution, whilst working out a revolution and 
founding a new nation. At once the sagacious economist, 
the consummate minister, and the dictator of a crisis, he is 
by turns laborious and energetic, subtle and impetuous, in- 
genious and audacious, practical and profound. Now it is his 
task to calm the agitation of a nation, then to call it to a 
struggle for life; now he imposes on it his own strong will, 
then addresses and instructs its judgment; sometimes con- 
vincing in the Parliament, sometimes stirring the public 
heart, sometimes guiding unseen the machinery of diplomacy 
and parties. 

He has the true vein of a great statesman. His whole 
action is practical, relative, and instinctive. His policy rests 
upon principle ; yet he is never the slave of his theories. He 
can rise to the grandeur of ideas, yet is never carried away 
by illusions. An inflexible purpose may bow before necessity 
and storms ; and out of every emergency still grasp the true 
clue upwards. No modern politician insists so firmly upon 
theory; none so consistently develops it into action; and 
none is so little cramped by it in practice. His love of order 
never stiffens into oppression; legality with him stops short 
of formalism; his mastery of logic is forgotten when logic 
has ceased to be of use. With a turn for diplomacy worthy 
of Talleyrand, his art is restrained to its due place and func- 
tion. A master of party politics, he is never greater than 
when he has ceased to be a parliamentary leader. Con- 
servative by nature, he knows the value of institutions; in 
the hour of crisis he sees in them nothing but forms. He has 
gauged popular emotion ; he neither mistakes its strength nor 
forgets its fickleness. 



CAVOUR 141 

With an appetite for power like Richelieu, he loves to rest 
upon public opinion ; and being a real dictator, he acts in the 
spirit of a responsible minister. With a native insight into 
character, there are no men and no parties whom he hesi- 
tates to use ; fanaticism or industry, authority or enthusiasm, 
craft or heroism, are instruments which he employs and con- 
trols. He can lay deep plans without being tortuous; be 
politic without falsehood; and strike an unexpected blow 
without treachery. In the state he grasps a concentration 
of power, which he wields without selfishness, and which is 
yielded without jealousy. In Parliament he can solicit the 
support of a majority without stooping to party triumphs. 
In the tribune he seeks to convince, not to confute ; to win 
confidence, not votes. He never perorates, but argues; 
generally careless in language, always keen in logic, some- 
times rising into moving eloquence, sometimes overcoming 
by inherent energy. 

In the Cabinet he is master of diplomatic fence, yet his 
logic is ever drawn from public right and plain principle. 
The exquisite skill with which he crushes his opponent's case 
is only equalled by the substantial justice of his own cause. 
His state-papers would be models of art if they were not 
standards of historic fact. With all his instinctive love of 
order and law, he sees that these are not ends but means. In 
a crisis he can rise superior to any notion but that of public 
safety and duty. To habitual industry in preparation he 
unites an impetuous rapidity of execution; and however 
careful in husbanding his resources, he is prodigal of them in 
action. His most daring schemes are all within the limits 
of reasonable safety ; if he oversteps legality, he remains true 
to right. In a word, he is in our day the single example of 
a ruler who governs by native superiority and that willing 
homage which ennobles the giver and the receiver. He shows 



142 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

us how power can be gathered into one hand, yet be but the 
expression of national will. Nor less is he an instance of a 
politician who conserves whilst he changes; who conciliates 
order and movement, tradition and expansion, the past and 
the present ; who innovates without convulsion, and modifies 
without destruction. Thus he is to us the type of the real 
popular dictator, and the statesman of true conservative 
progress. 

Garibaldi 

Such are the characteristics of Count Cavour, and they are 
those essentially of the statesman. But they represent but 
one element of the Italian movement alone. The sagacity, 
self-restraint, and perseverance which have marked it are 
amply exhibited in him, but for all that has given it life, 
poetry, and moral grandeur, we must find a very different 
representative. The virtues, aspirations, and powers which 
we attribute to Garibaldi belong not either to the minister 
himself, nor to the classes of whom he is the chief. There 
exists beneath the surface an intensely popular element in 
this Italian revolution, showing in reality nearly all the 
features which have distinguished the effervescence of new 
ideas in the mind of the whole people, and recalling in the 
strength of its enthusiasm, in the electric contagion of its 
ideas, and in its influence on the moral sentiments, the spirit 
which can be seen to move through nations in great crises 
of their history. 

We can thus best understand the heaving and agitation of 
the mass of the people, a new idea sweeping over them like 
an epidemic, kindling in the hearts of man and woman a 
fanatical enthusiasm, moving man to man and class to class, 
elevating debased populations into momentary impulses of 



GARIBALDI 1 43 

dignity and virtue, and inspiring the finer tempers with un- 
wonted fires of self-sacrifice and daring. Thus it was that 
in silent cities the people has sprung forth as under some 
sudden frenzy, that armies have laid down their arms at the 
magical influence of a name or a voice, that men of wealth, 
position, and refinement have hastened to stand shoulder to 
shoulder with the peasant on bloody battlefields or more 
deadly camps, and have given up every earthly interest, and 
even the convictions of their whole lives, in defence of a 
sacred cause. We are far too apt in presence of the dis- 
cipline which has been submitted to, and of the manifest 
inferiority of the Southern population, to underrate the ex- 
tent as well as the intensity of the enthusiasm of the people 
of the North. The immense depopulation of Venetia, the 
100,000 men who since the beginning of the war have volun- 
teered into the different armies, the sacrifices borne, and the 
heroism shown by whole classes of men, and the resolution 
and patriotism of the bulk of the people of the North, cannot 
be effaced by any tales of failure and indifference in detail, 
or the worthlessness of the demoralised cities or barbarous 
peasantry of the South. 

It is the army of Garibaldi, and their leader himself, who 
most worthily represents all this element of the movement. 
With all their dexterity and experience the supporters of the 
statesman do not adequately embody the vitality and eleva- 
tion of the popular instinct. The heroic soldier and his men 
belong not to the men who can guide and administer a state, 
but they are of those who fought with Manin the desperate 
defence of Venice, and maintained the honour of their capital 
against the treacherous insolence of France, — of men who, 
like the Bandiera, Bassi, or Ciceroacchio, have been mur- 
dered in cold blood, who have spent their lives in prison and 
exile, and lived a long martyrdom for their cause. Without 



144 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the spirit which sustained these men in the dungeon or on 
the scaffold, it would have been impossible that the sacred 
tradition could have kept its purity and strength. These are 
the men, and the party to which they belonged, who have 
taught the youth of Italy to feel the holiness of their cause, 
who have clothed it with an irradiating splendour, and re- 
quired from its supporters a devotion and a moral elevation 
unsurpassed. To them it is due that the expulsion of the 
stranger means a real national regeneration, and that the 
future of Italy is made to rest upon the individual worth of 
the citizens. They are the men who first saw and preached 
the duty of absolute unity, of the consolidation of states, and 
the fraternity of classes and orders, and who upheld the 
singleness and directness of purpose to the one great end. 
To them is due chiefly that which gives moral dignity to the 
Italian people, and but for them the sagacity or energy of 
the statesmen would have dealt only with untutored masses 
and a lifeless, passionless multitude. 

It is quite consistent with this view to disbelieve most 
strongly in the capacity of such men for government or 
direction. With the most emphatic conviction of the utter 
hopelessness of any revolution attempted under the control 
of such men, it is impossible to refuse to the revolutionary 
parties, whether under the name of Republican or National, 
Mazzinist or Garibaldian, the credit of having set in motion 
an action of which others were the more fortunate directors. 
Mazzini, Garibaldi, Guerrazzi, or Bertani have abundantly 
manifested, on one occasion after another, their incapacity 
for civil organisation and rule, and the public instinct is 
quite justified in looking upon their ascendancy with uncon- 
querable aversion. But as agitators their influence has been 
indispensable. It is true that in 1848 they led the na- 
tional cause to ruin, but it is equally clear that their prin- 



GARIBALDI 



45 



ciples prepared it for triumph in i860. More and more we 
are forced to see how powerfully the abortive struggle of 
1848 acted upon the national mind, and led up to the success 
we have lately witnessed. The Lombard and Venetian in- 
surrections, the popular votes of annexation in the Duchies, 
the heroism of the defence of Rome, had educated the masses 
with a sense of their duty and an instinct towards union. 

The effort of 1848 was crushed by force, but not the less 
was it a moral triumph. It awakened the national con- 
science, and penetrated the depressed multitude. It planted 
the standard of the nation, and taught the creed of unity 
and the religion of patriotism. The task of the statesmen 
of Piedmont was but to moderate, guide, and organise the 
irrepressible spirit of freedom, which was the outgrowth of 
the rising of 1848. More and more do we see in i860, under 
happier and wiser guidance, the noble enthusiasm and aspira- 
tions of 1848. But that effort was made notoriously under 
the auspices and direction of the Republicans. If we meas- 
ure out to them our condemnation of the unwisdom which 
brought them to ruin, we should no less give them credit for 
the spirit which at least they succeeded in inspiring. With 
no stain upon its honour, with no possible charge against it 
but that of misfortune and misconception, the effort of 1848 
cannot be stigmatised as the work of incendiaries or dema- 
gogues. The great agitator to whom that movement owes 
at once its energy and its unsuccess may indeed have been the 
victim of desperate illusions, but wilful ignorance only can 
charge him with baseness, or downright malice only repre- 
sent him as a sanguinary fanatic. Whatever faults may have 
been committed by the Republican Governments in Italy 
during 1848, no single charge of violence or selfishness has 
ever been established against them. And those who have 
really had any knowledge of these leaders know them to 



146 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

possess a singleness of purpose, a strength of principle, and 
a touching love of their country and their countrymen, which 
surpasses in depth and purity anything that their rivals or 
their maligners can show. 

Whatever may be the judgment passed upon this party 
and the true character of its members, certain it is that 
Garibaldi himself is its truest and fullest representative. It 
is mere self-deception to deny that he really belongs to that 
body with whom his whole life has been passed, and all his 
ideas derived. It is much the fashion to revile all the revo- 
lutionary leaders amongst men, who forget that they thereby 
are discrediting the whole previous history of their favourite 
hero, and must wilfully distort the plainest evidence of his 
acts. In spite of the most convincing proofs that he looks 
on Mazzini still with friendship and trust, that all his friends 
belong to the old Republican parties, and all his acts are 
dictated by the old doctrines of insurrection, the mere fact 
of his allegiance to the king is supposed to place him in the 
constitutional party. The fact is, that he belongs to the 
revolutionary classes, by his whole nature, habits, history, 
and situation. He shares with them his greatness of heart, 
and draws from them the false theories of his political creed. 
He amplifies and exalts their virtues, but he is not the less 
involved in their illusions and defects. The highest political 
virtues are not incompatible with great political incompe- 
tence, and the noblest elevation of character cannot exclude 
fatal intellectual errors. 

It is by his character and not by his intellect that Gari- 
baldi holds his sway. It is not by what he directly does that 
he inspires his country, but by the mysterious influence of his 
spirit and life. In his story the humblest and most ignorant 
can feel instinctively the worth of a life unstained by one 
selfish act or worldly motive ; the simple majesty of a man to 






GARIBALDI 1 47 

whose eye his fellow-men are seen as man to man, stripped of 
every circumstance of accident or rank, men in whose soul 
burns nothing but the fire which makes martyrs and heroes. 
It is this power which gives him a moral influence, which 
neither king or minister can approach. Not merely through 
his own country does this influence extend. It spreads 
strangely through the extent of civilised Europe. We have 
seen that his name inspires a something more than passing 
sympathy, and is mixed with convictions of unusual tenacity. 
Strange stories are told of artisans in Berlin, worshipping in 
the streets at a shrine of St. Garibaldi, and how his name 
stirred the blood of the Faubourg St. Antoine in Paris. To 
the workmen of Glasgow or Lyons, as much as of Naples or 
Milan, he represents the claims of their own order, and from 
Poland to Spain, and from Scotland to Sicily, his course has 
kindled the interest of the democracy of Europe. 

He has, in every fibre, the nature of the people, and em- 
bodies their craving for a nobler future to be won by their 
innate energy. He has their strength and their weakness; 
their generous instincts and their incoherent doctrines; and 
his career, in which both have been signally exhibited, has 
awakened a motion of that spirit which runs through each 
state in Europe when revolution begins in one. He feels 
himself to belong not only to Italy, but to the cause of liberty 
through Europe. When he fights in the Republics of 
America, when he promises his sword to Hungary, or ex- 
presses his sympathy with the people in England or France, 
it is because he feels instinctively the brotherhood of people 
with people, and the bonds which unite their future destinies 
in one. Nor does he ever fail to show that he belongs little 
to the actual political systems, but to a new and possible 
order of things. To him the forms, constitutions, and cere- 
monials of the day are vanity and expedients. He feels 



148 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

intensely with the heart of the nation, and believes it will 
rise into a higher life. His perfect simplicity of existence, his 
contempt for dignities, wealth, or power, his gentleness and 
guilelessness of heart belong indeed to a period when public 
life shall have risen to a purer atmosphere. That he does 
not understand it as it is, that he is ignorant of its tortuous 
mechanism, is more to his honour than to his discredit. He 
has left the task for which he has neither ability nor heart to 
others. He has gone back to his own simple world. He 
has left behind him the memory of an unsullied character, a 
sense of duty, and a love of truth, of which his age can see but 
half the worth and beauty. 

But whilst Garibaldi retains the idea and babits of those 
with whom he has acted through life, his fine character 
enables him to see and avoid the errors which are peculiar to 
them. It is this instinct which has gathered up all his facul- 
ties with native sincerity round the standard of Savoy, and 
has made as the centre of his creed loyalty to King Victor 
Emmanuel. But this adherence to the king is very far from 
being with him a political dogma. It is nothing but an in- 
stinctive conception of the necessity of the case and the prac- 
tical sense of a man of action. His whole mind, however, is 
essentially republican, and there is something preposterous 
in supposing that such a man can have any leaning towards 
monarchy as a system. But he loves and honours the soldier 
king in his heart, and he has idealised in him the national 
life. To this beautiful fiction in the mind of Garibaldi is 
perhaps due more than to any other single cause the wel- 
come which the staunchest Republicans have given to the once 
hated House of Savoy. 

He, the man to whom peasant or prince appears each in 
his native worth as man, to whom all the trappings of social 
life are contemptible, and the whole political system of which 



GARIBALDI 1 49 

the monarchy is but the head is alien, to whom laws, tradi- 
tion, or custom weigh nothing in the balance against the 
safety of the people and the honour of the nation, gives hearty 
allegiance to the king, in whom he sees personified the des- 
tinies of his country, and who is pointed out by fate as its 
natural dictator and chief. Under such an influence only 
could a nation in whom the bare notion of monarchy has 
never been fairly implanted, and in whom in this age no 
dogmas of a constitutional aristocracy are ever likely to im- 
plant it, receive with enthusiastic submission the monarch 
who was indispensable as a centre of union and of action. It 
was through this personal trust of Garibaldi that, in moments 
of great danger, fatal mistakes were avoided, when after the 
armistice of Villafranca, on the several proposed invasions 
of the Papal territories or the liberation of Sicily and Naples, 
it required the whole force of an influence like his to 
restrain the fiercest tempers and most earnest Republicans 
collected round his standard from raising a separate standard, 
and at once commencing a career of insurrection. 

It is this idea which forms the principal link between two 
very opposite parties — in a word, between the two distinct 
schools of policy of Italy — the constitutional and revolu- 
tionary. Nothing but a practical compromise in the person 
of a beloved leader could reconcile two parties who so thor- 
oughly misunderstand and dislike each other. More than 
anything else, the example of Garibaldi has contributed to 
this end. At his word the most inveterate Republicans have 
consented to forego their principles, and the high sense of 
Cavour has not feared to use their indispensable services. It 
was the name of Garibaldi which finally decided the adhe- 
sion of the old party throughout Italy in 1859, and has re- 
tained them true to their allegiance under the most trying 
circumstances. But it is no less clear that he is heart and 



150 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

soul with them. The revolutionary engine — the levee en 
masse — war carried on by insurrection — trust alone in 
native valour without discipline, organisation, or ceremony, 
is the only weapon which he knows. Diplomatic measures, 
foreign assistance, unless simply of volunteers, material 
equipment, and even military science are to him as irksome 
and worthless as golden trappings or braided uniforms. He 
appeals to the heart of the people alone, and trusts in their 
innate honour, energy, and heroism. 

It is this which makes at once his strength and his weak- 
ness. He typifies and he evokes the life which alone can 
make a nation free or strong, but he discards at once all the 
institutions by which its strength is disciplined and directed. 
Himself and his followers feel in them no small measure of 
that unquenchable fire which in 1793 preserved and created 
France ; they will not see how far the condition of their coun- 
try and their countrymen is removed from that era of con- 
vulsive excitement. Yet no little of the religious zeal of those 
French Republicans may be seen in his army and in him. 
To him the cause and its defenders are alike sacred and dear. 
He can hardly understand that one who has laboured and 
suffered for Italy is unworthy of responsibility and confi- 
dence. In his eyes, one who has bled on the field or pined 
in a dungeon is a martyr to whom honour, influence, and 
trust are due without stint or hesitation. He who has en- 
dured the longest exile or the heaviest irons, or he who is 
most hateful to the common enemy, must of all men be most 
capable and worthy to serve the common country. He who 
has shown most his love for her must be best fitted to protect 
her. He who in the darkest hour uttered the most inspiring 
protest is the truest guide in the hour of relief. Devotion 
must imply capacity, and unbounded faith is the best proof 
of a patriotic heart. 



GARIBALDI 151 

Such is the spirit in which the simple-hearted soldier clings 
to his old friends and their views, upholds Mazzini, Crispi, 
Mordini, Mario, and Cattaneo, and thrusts, as rulers, upon 
the bewildered Neapolitans and Sicilians men who have 
learnt their creed of politics and system of action in con- 
spiracies, in exile, and in dungeons. With him they hold 
such a place as the "people of God" held in the heart of 
Cromwell. Those who have given all for the cause are 
sanctified in his eyes. He feels for them as members of a 
sort of religious brotherhood, of whose rectitude and zeal 
no doubt can be permitted. These are the spirits, as he 
believes, the country needs. It wants nothing but sincerity 
and vigour. They who love it most serve it best. The in- 
trigues and artifices of professional politicians discredit and 
pervert the national honour. Compromises, arrangements, 
and prevarications belong to their trade. The moral sense 
is lowered by their specious precautions, and the keenness 
of self-reliance is blunted by their diplomacy. Innate energy 
and daring are nobler and surer weapons; the generous 
hearts of the people will do the rest. Brotherly affection 
and frank forbearance must soothe the antipathies of party. 
Unity of purpose and genuine zeal will preserve the public 
security and order. Generosity will supply the necessaries 
of life. Mutual trust must stand for discipline ; the service 
of the country is above any earthly reward; its true leaders 
need no formal commissions or solemn election. Heroic 
valour supplies the place of armies, and simple manhood and 
its own great heart will create a nation worthy of freedom. 

But whilst believing this in all sincerity and fervour, he 
is a slave to no system, and is not deluded by any narrow 
dogma. The same love for his country which he perceives 
in Mazzini, he recognises in Victor Emmanuel. He, too, and 
his soldiers and generals, have fought and laboured for the 



152 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

cause; and the very ministers and politicians and official 
servants of the state have, as he sees, after their fashion, a 
genuine sense of the common duty. Hence, throwing aside 
all logic, his fine instinct unites both parties in one. Full 
of loyalty to the king, he yet holds by all the friends of his 
old days; devoted to the principles of Mazzini, he submits 
to the will of the king and his ministers. Thus are two 
rival and hostile parties reunited and reconciled. The Gari- 
baldians dare not repudiate a king whom their beloved chief 
delights to honour and obey. The monarchists are forced 
to be forbearing with a party to whose head they owe an in- 
comparable service. The one have come to feel that from 
the ranks of the revolution has come forth the noblest son 
of Italy; the others, with their leader, can say, "We are 
Republicans still, but our republic is Victor Emmanuel." 

This sense of duty to the king, in whom he sees personified 
the union and the honour of the country, at last, after many 
struggles, induced him to surrender the dictatorship of the 
South, in spite of his deepest convictions and an intense 
repugnance to the ministry of Cavour. Full of the purest 
ideas of the insurrectionary party, still smarting under the 
shameful sacrifice of Nice, and cherishing an inextinguish- 
able hatred of Napoleon, Garibaldi was bent on retaining the 
power in South Italy, and rushing with blind heroism to the 
rescue of Venice and Rome. It needed the whole strength 
of his unalloyed trust in the king to restrain him from this 
fatal delirium. With many struggles he recovered his reason ; 
his instinctive good sense returned. Almost heart-broken by 
the sacrifice, he gave up, in the presence of an overpowering 
sense of duty, all that he holds most dear and most true. He 
consented to look on upon the prolonged slavery of his breth- 
ren ; to yield to the will of a degrading oppressor ; to sacrifice 
his oldest friends and most trusted followers. And last trial 



GARIBALDI 1 53 

of all, he consented to place the work of his own hands and 
the people he had fought for into the keeping of men to 
whom he bears the keenest antipathy, to whose policy his 
whole life is a protest, and who have but recently degraded 
the nation and bartered its very principle of life. Such was 
the temper in which the Dictator, much loth, accepted the 
annexation and its consequences. 

It needed some overpowering sense of duty to counter- 
balance his ingrained convictions. Had he not acted so, it 
is plain that he was going on the road to ruin. Not only 
must his attack have been infallibly crushed in the field (even 
it would seem by the arms of Sardinia herself), but the inter- 
nal state of the country would have shortly resulted in irre- 
deemable chaos. It may indeed now be assumed that the 
Garibaldian regime would have ended in Naples in the most 
complete dissolution and anarchy, and almost the rupture 
of society itself. It needs little argument in the face of in- 
contestable facts. Not indeed that the rulers appointed were 
in themselves incompetent or untrustworthy, but because 
they were wholly incompatible with the people whom they had 
to govern. Full of the notions of insurrection and revolution, 
they were applying their own extreme and incoherent system 
in a society quite unprepared for it, and to circumstances in 
which it was an anachronism. In a half-barbarous and de- 
based population it was necessary not to inflame, but to calm ; 
not to impel, but to restrain. They needed the strong hand 
of a regular and orderly Government, not the exciting stimu- 
lus of insurrectionary committees, and the whole apparatus 
of revolutionary action. Such a population could be con- 
trolled only by the accustomed weight of recognised Govern- 
ment. The Dictator was full of trust that they could be 
aroused to the due point of insurgent energy. But a blunder 
so fatal as this does not conclusively prove his incapacity for 



154 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

civil government under more favourable circumstances. It 
only shows that he had thoroughly mistaken the situation 
and the real necessities of the case, and was only able to 
shake himself free from the notions and habits of his whole 
previous life by an effort of the most splendid abnegation, 
and by withdrawing altogether and abruptly from a post 
the duties of which he profoundly misconceived. 

The sacrifice of principle once made, the retirement to 
Caprera was a necessary and subordinate incident. Much 
has been said of this act by men who little understand his 
character. It was neither the result of mortification, or 
impulse, or vanity, much less of a morose or factious temper. 
With him to retire to his position as a simple yeoman was a 
natural consequence of no public task needing him. The 
self-sacrifice is seen in the surrender of his principles and 
friends, not in his love of the happiness of private life. Gari- 
baldi, if not the leader of a revolution, is nothing. To head 
an army of heroes, to awaken the enthusiasm of a popula- 
tion, to initiate a new order of ideas and acts, is his only duty. 
To organise, to govern, and to compromise, to prepare by 
patient forethought, or devise by dexterous management, is 
above or below his power. He cannot make the laborious 
official, or the sagacious minister, or the rigid disciplinarian. 
His character is too lofty for the petty necessities of these 
duties. He belongs wholly to a purer atmosphere. When 
no unusual effort is required, there is little in which he can 
serve his country. He retires in the calmer moments of or- 
dinary life to the simplicity of the life of the humblest citizen. 
Yet natural and voluntary as his retirement has been, it is 
not the less melancholy. For a character of such strength 
the surrender of such hopes and purposes gives a profound 
shock. Though feeling the necessity of the case, he could 
scarcely comprehend all the reasons which made his mere 



GARIBALDI 1 55 

presence a danger. Yet his retirement to his island is, per- 
haps, the most instructive, as it is certainly the most hon- 
ourable act of his life. By it his party have learnt to yield, 
however reluctantly, to the true interests of their country; 
and the name of an Italian has been placed before the eyes 
of Europe as the symbol of the purest self-devotion, and a 
religious sense of public duty. 

Garibaldi thus gives to the national movement a character 
which was essential, and could come from no other. The 
creation of a nation needs more than victories, treaties, in- 
stitutions, or administration. Success in the field or the coun- 
cil may furnish it with opportunities. True national life 
needs real public regeneration. It is right, then, that Gari- 
baldi should be felt to be the popular hero. In a prolonged 
struggle, requiring so much from skill, circumstances, and 
foreign aid, it needed the contact of one great heart to keep 
alive the sense of dignity and honour. Whilst ministers 
were engaged in diplomacy, intrigue, or compromise (essen- 
tial as they too were), it was well that a hero should be found 
to speak of nothing but truth and duty. Italian nationality 
means more than independence and freedom, or it means 
little. To show its true destiny, it needed one splendid ex- 
ample of public duty without blemish or alloy. Henceforth 
for all Italians the memory of freedom is for ever bound up 
with the ideal of perfect social virtue. In years to come, in 
the strife of public life they may learn from him higher aims 
and nobler acts. Nor was it less essential that in a deadly 
struggle with a foreigner they should be headed by one who 
knows the true brotherhood of nations: and that a war of 
hatred should be tempered by one who has a woman's gentle- 
ness and mercy. Thus the Italian has fought without the 
brutalising hate of race ; and no single instance of ferocity 
has stained his chivalry : for their chief loves all brave men, 



156 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

and can pity even the oppressor. Nor has this reconsecra- 
tion of war brought back its barbarous tradition, or its retro- 
grade instincts. He, who for the last time has made war 
noble in Europe, has cried aloud to it with almost fa- 
natic aspiration for universal peace. The noblest soldier 
of our day tramples on the pomp and pride of war with 
native loathing and contempt. So, too, it was right that the 
popular heroism which lay burning beneath the action of 
state policy should have its due place and task. If all the 
power in this national struggle has gone to the great and 
noble, it was well that the true halo should rest round one 
who is of and with the people. In the midst of convulsion 
and strife, there rises up an image of mildness, simplicity, 
and tenderness, a gentle spirit calming passions, jealousies, 
and hatreds, disarming treachery, and putting selfishness to 
shame. Men have seen in his look the traditional image of 
goodness, and have not scrupled to call him the Apostle and 
Messiah of their race, as at once the deliverer from oppres- 
sion and the teacher of a moral regeneration. 

Of all the comparisons which have been made for him 
there are none which are not very wide of the reality. He 
has, indeed, none of the qualities of statesman, dictator, or 
commander. That which belongs to him exclusively is a 
species of popular inspiration and influence as by electric 
contagion of emotions. More than to warriors or politicians 
he belongs to the order of religious enthusiasts. It is a char- 
acter infusing itself through a nation. One story there is in 
history which in some moments recalls the features of his. 
One character there has been with whom his has some traits 
of likeness. Utterly unlike, as in many respects it is (and 
without instituting a purely fanciful comparison), there is 
something in the great Liberator of the spirit of the Maid of 
Orleans. Sprung like her from the depths of the people 



GARIBALDI 157 

with whom he is identified in every fibre of his heart, he, 
too, in the extreme need of his country, has upraised it by 
an almost miraculous career. As in hers, the destinies of 
his country are bound up in his mind with the will of Provi- 
dence, from whom deliverance is looked for by a faith truly 
religious. She, the simplest and purest of spirits, went forth 
from her peasant home rapt almost in a trance through her 
deep "pity for the realm of France," and intense belief in the 
greatness of her people, and carrying daring and devotion 
to the verge of fanaticism, awoke in the very depths of society 
the heart of the nation out of the midst of despair, until by 
the sheer strength of native worth, the overwrought people 
had vindicated for themselves their honour and salvation, 
in spite of every human obstacle, and in defiance of every 
recognised means or aid. A spirit not absolutely of another 
kind burns also in him. He, goaded almost to madness at 
the sight of his country's degradation, and called forth by 
the consciousness of a nobler destiny, has given up his 
every thought, act, and wish as to a sacred cause; and 
touching the inmost heart of his brothers, and calling them 
round a king in whom the nation itself is idealised before 
his eyes, has led them on to incredible success, and inspired 
them with unconquerable faith. She who breathed life 
into France, her work once done, was a peasant girl again. 
So, too, the rock of Caprera lives in the hearts of millions of 
Italians as the emblem of perfect worth, of moral dignity, 
and of faith unwavering. 



VI 

AFGHANISTAN 

(1879) 

At the close of the second administration of Lord Beaconsfield, 
in December 1879, public opinion was deeply excited over 
the wanton invasion of Afghanistan and the continued 
Indian warfare instigated by the Viceroy as part of his 
policy of Imperial expansion. Mr. Gladstone and the 
leaders of the Liberal party were incessantly denouncing 
these adventures in speeches which led to the fall of the 
Government early in 1880. 

I was at the time in close touch with them and in con- 
stant relations with Mr. John Morley, then editor of the 
Fortnightly Review. / carefully studied the news of 
the Afghan war and the military occupation of Kabul, 
seeing all telegrams published in India or at home. The 
system of secrecy by means of the u military censorship" 
was not then organised so strictly as it has been in our 
later wars. 

Besides this, I was in daily communication with the 
late Lord Hobhouse and the late Sir Henry Norman, and 
other old soldiers and officials, who voluntarily supplied 
me with information not known outside the India Office, 
and with private letters written home by officers in ac- 
tive service. I received a long correspondence from Lord 
158 



AFGHANISTAN 1 59 

Lytton himself, and I saw letters from a former Viceroy, 
besides others from officers in the front who were unknown 
to me and to whom I was unknown. 

By these means I was in possession of a body of exact 
and authoritative details as to all that took place. The 
attempts made by officials in India to trace my means of 
information signally failed, because the writers of the con- 
fidential letters shown me did not even know my name. 
With the support of the editor and of his political friends, I 
wrote two articles in the Fortnightly Review, December 
1879 and March 1880 (Nos. 156, 159), using the mass 
of special knowledge I possessed. The first of these was 
reprinted as a pamphlet, and was circulated widely by one 
of the Liberal Associations at their cost. Attempts were 
made to dispute some of my statements of fact; but I 
never saw any replies which were not either irrelevant or 
false — " as false as a bulletin." 

I now reissue the more general and permanent parts 
of the first of these articles. I reserve for the future the 
special details of the incidents of the war; but, as I still 
hold my papers and many letters from eminent persons, I 
can substantiate all that I state when the time comes. It is 
fortunate that our relations with Afghanistan are now 
friendly and permanent, so that no indiscretions can be 
charged in returning to a history nearly thirty years old. 

The general principles of international morality and of 
justice herein maintained are just as important as ever 
and are quite as much in danger of being violated. In- 
deed, the same crimes and follies have been continually 
committed, and by both political parties alternately, in the 
long series of Asian and African wars of the last thirty 
years — down to the most recent of all — the idiotic cam- 
paign in Tibet (1908). 



l6o NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

"A superior race is bound to observe the highest current 
morality of the time in all its dealings with the subject 
race." — John Morley. 

By what title are we treating the Afghan people as rebels? 
By what law are our generals hanging men on charges of 
leading the enemy's forces to battle? Whence comes our 
right to kill priests who incite their people to resist us ? That 
our armies have invaded Afghanistan, and in two expeditions 
have crushed the soldiers from Kabul, we all know. That 
we have broken up what shadow of state existed; that we 
have its titular ruler a prisoner; that we have seized his 
treasures, and destroyed the centre of his capital — all this is 
very true. It is what invaders and conquerors usually do, or 
at least have done in former ages. But having done all this, 
by what right, in public law or in moral justice, do we now 
affect to treat the conquered people as rebels, and hang the 
generals and the priests who led them to defend their country ? 
We well know what is the official plea for these acts. It was 
not unskilfully concocted. It is this. Down to last August 
we had on our North- Western frontier in India, it was said, 
a strong, friendly, and independent kingdom. We had 
lately entered on closer terms of amity with this friendly 
nation, and had covered its sovereign with personal favours. 
We had an envoy and a brilliant suite in his capital. Sud- 
denly a faction in his army mutiny; they overpower our 
friendly prince ; they attack our embassy, and kill our en- 
voy and his escort. The prince for the moment is unable to 
restore order ; we go to assist him ; he even invites us. We 
enter his kingdom to assist in maintaining the police. A 
few murderers and robbers still trouble the security of his 
capital. We must assist our friend to overcome his rebels 
and mutineers at home. 



AFGHANISTAN l6l 

So far the official plea runs smoothly enough. But in the 
face of the facts we know, it has grown too unreal to be 
stated with gravity. Our expedition to restore order in the 
midst of a mutiny becomes an army of invasion and conquest. 
India heaves with the effort. The North- West is denuded 
of its troops ; swept of its baggage animals, its supplies, and 
its material. Millions and millions are poured out with an 
almost desperate eagerness to win. As the invading army 
advances, it finds that a war is before it at least as formidable 
as the former war of conquest. The mutineers prove to be 
the regular troops of Kabul ; they fight battles with obstinacy ; 
they do all that a half-armed and semi-civilised race of moun- 
taineers can do to defend their homes and their freedom. 
Our armies advance with skill and rapidity ; the resistance is 
crushed out in a series of battles, bloody enough to the de- 
feated, and certainly spoken of as victories at home. The 
capital is occupied with all the formalities of a conquered 
city ; and the people are dealt with as national enemies. It 
turns out that in all probability the friendly prince was him- 
self the author of the attack ; that he must be kept a prisoner, 
and no doubt will be tried for his life ; his property is seized, 
his palace destroyed, and his titular kingdom is treated as 
a thing of the past. The occupied country is dealt with as a 
conquered province ; and an outcry is raised from our soldiers 
to annex it without more ado. 

It seemed good last year to the British Government to 
invade a neighbouring independent people. That people 
was a group of rude tribes hardly formed into a state, fiercely 
fanatical in religion, and proud of their freedom and inde- 
pendence. After laying heavy burdens on suffering India, 
our armies succeeded in crushing the national defence, in 
driving the sovereign into exile and death, in destroying what 
cohesion had previously existed in his name. A period of 



l62 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

confusion followed, the kingdom dissolved into separate and 
unsettled groups, and the tribes and chiefs made the most of 
their new independence. Some partial attempt at resettle- 
ment followed. A son of the dead sovereign, just released 
from a long imprisonment, succeeded in securing some show 
of authority in the capital, and in some other parts of the 
country. It was convenient to treat him as the ruler, and we 
partly enabled him to become so in fact. The late envoy 
forced on the bewildered prince such terms as it suited us to 
dictate, and with fair words a nominal peace was effected. 

But all who knew Afghanistan warned us that the treaty 
was a piece of paper, that the prince had no real power to 
execute the treaty, even if he had the will, that a large por- 
tion of the country repudiated him, that the leading spirits 
of the people regarded him as a traitor, a puppet, and a 
coward. If ever warning was justified by events it was that 
which all the cooler heads foretold when they said that to 
make your puppet sign an ignominious treaty was not to 
conquer a country, and to send a small force to hector over 
the puppet in his mountain capital was a wild and foolhardy 
scheme. However, it was done. Into the midst of a turmoil 
of fierce tribes, smarting under defeat, furious with religious 
hatred, and torn by intrigues and dissensions, the so-called 
envoy was sent to enforce the terms of a so-called treaty which 
the tribes had in no way accepted, to dictate to a sovereign 
who was hardly obeyed by his own bodyguard, and scarcely 
secure in his own capital. Almost the one thing that Afghans 
and their chiefs for generations had agreed in was to resist 
the presence of British soldiers and officials. And here, by 
virtue of a treaty which these chiefs repudiated, signed by a 
prince whom many of them did not acknowledge, a small 
British force entered the capital, headed by the soldier who 
last year sought almost to force the Khyber Pass, and who 



AFGHANISTAN 1 63 

this year had personally dictated the treaty. It was almost 
to invite an outrage, to make a collision inevitable. What 
else could we have done if we wished an excuse for a new 
war? 

But this peaceful ambassador was only an ambassador 
in name. He came at the head of a squadron. The so- 
called suite of this so-called envoy consisted of a small mili- 
tary force of about sixty or seventy picked soldiers. It is 
true they were not strong enough for an army; but they 
were much too strong for an embassy. It was not quite a 
corps of occupation, nor quite a corps of observation, and 
they came in what was at least a military truce. But they 
practically served the purpose of an army of occupation and 
of a corps of observation ; and they visibly represented an 
ample army in reserve. When we know what feats have 
been done by British soldiers in the midst of barbarous races, 
it was only a little in excess of the ordinary odds. They 
were not there exactly to right — they were there to overawe 
and to control. The time was not precisely war ; but it was 
little more than a truce. 

The small corps came into Kabul much as the famous uhlan 
in 1870 rode into a French town. He too did not come to 
fight ; he came to overawe the citizens into carrying out his 
orders. The Red Prince was never far behind ; and in the 
meantime the uhlan took military occupation of the city, and 
the practical control of the citizens. But the uhlan took his 
chance of being shot. The position of Sir L. Cavagnari was 
not exactly this. But it was not very far from it. He had 
gone into the midst of a turbulent enemy, in advance of the 
regular army. He held a nominal political office, and he 
came under the terms of a so-called treaty. But he came, 
as he well knew, with his life in his hand. I shall say noth- 
ing to dishonour the memory of a brave, but wild man. He 



164 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

thought that audacity might supply the place of troops; he 
believed that his death, if he died, would be heroic. He has 
died as a brave soldier dies, at the head of his men, fighting 
against overwhelming odds with a half-barbarous enemy, 
whom he meant to conquer and whom he thought to overawe. 
But he has died, as a soldier dies, in what was virtually an 
act of war. 

This so-called envoy was in truth a soldier sent out on an 
advanced post, into a country seething with civil war, from 
which the invading armies had scarcely withdrawn, under a 
treaty signed by a mere unrecognised pretender. He is 
sent into a city which admits no other European on any 
pretence ; where, as Lord Lawrence used to say, no Euro- 
pean's life is safe for an hour, and where no Ameer could 
protect him ; amongst wild mountaineers and fanatical Mos- 
lems, who regard the presence of an Englishman as a personal 
humiliation. He was sent out with a small force really to 
secure the advantages of a war, which all sensible men said 
was far from ended. To treat the death of this soldier, 
ordered out on a forlorn hope like this, as the murder of an 
ambassador to a civilised power, to be avenged with all the 
punctilio of European diplomacy, is mere chicanery. And 
upon this chicanery is built up the claim to punish the last 
efforts of Afghan self-defence as mutiny, rebellion, and 
murder. 

Even this chicanery itself is not consistently maintained. 
The legitimate mode of redressing the slaughter of an envoy 
is to make war upon the state, to coerce its government, and 
to obtain satisfaction. But war with a state, however great 
the provocation, gives no right to hang generals and priests, 
who head the national resistance. If, in the very act of war, 
the state is reduced to atoms, and its government shattered 
or dissolved, that may give a right to the injured Power to 



AFGHANISTAN 1 65 

punish the actual offenders itself, and to set up a government 
of its own. But what we now complain of is, not the pun- 
ishment of the men who committed the outrage, or fair 
attempts to restore a government, but the hanging of generals 
and priests whose crime is to have animated a national de- 
fence, the proclaiming that all who resist the British invader 
shall be treated as rebels, and the setting rewards upon their 
heads. For this there is no justification whatever in public 
law, in morality, or even decency. 

Against whom are these men rebels? You have seized 
their ruler as a prisoner : from the first he was practically a 
hostage. You are about to try him for his life on the charge 
that he instigated or approved of the attack. How came 
the Afghan soldiers at Charasiab to be mutineers? They 
fought as regular regiments under their own native officers, 
and to all appearances at the secret orders of their nominal 
prince. Where is the government that they defy? There 
is no government, or shadow of government, except the 
British army, and the late government which is now its pris- 
oner. And the British army are plainly invaders who have 
deposed two sovereigns and destroyed two governments. 
Are the men you hang the authors of the attack on the em- 
bassy? Where are the proofs of it? What is the evidence 
that satisfies a court-martial, on fire with military vengeance ; 
smarting under a bitter catastrophe, and the cruel death of 
brave comrades? What is the law you use in your drum- 
head commissions, whence issue no reports that you do not 
countersign, where is no independent or civilian witness? 
The men whom you hang, you pretend, have abetted the 
outrages after the fact, by resisting the invaders of their coun- 
try, by taking arms against the British forces. 

By this military indictment, every soldier in the Afghan 
armies supports the rebels; rebels are those who abet the 



1 66 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

mutineers; mutineers are those who resist the British; and 
those who resist the British are guilty (after the fact) of 
murder of the British envoy. Mutiny, rebellion, outlawry, 
murder, on your lips are nothing but random phrases, tossed 
together by soldiers, parading the terms of law and justice ; 
who really come to conquer a brave, but turbulent race ; who 
mean to kill all who oppose them, and to terrify the rest into 
the show of submission. The pretexts that justify this un- 
soldierlike slaughter of prisoners of war are chicanery, worthy 
of Scroggs and JefTeries. And the putting men to death by 
legal chicanery bears an ugly name in English history. The 
meaning of it, that which justifies it in the eyes of soldiers, 
and probably of some politicians, is this — that since the 
difficulties of subduing Afghanistan permanently are very 
great, and the forces that are sent to do it are very small, and 
since Kabul is in the heart of Asia away from all European 
observation, and veiled by the "military censure," recourse 
must be had to terrorism. 

It would be better to give up this affectation of legality, 
and, if it is necessary to herald a war of conquest with proc- 
lamations in the style of Oriental Caliphs, to open thus : — 
"Be it known to all men in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the 
name of the Empress of India, and so forth. Whereas, 
for sufficient reasons, we have determined to subdue the 
people of Afghanistan, we hereby warn you not to resist 
our victorious armies. If you oppose our good pleasure, 
we shall hang some of you, until the others obey and submit. 
Such part of the city as we think fit we shall destroy, and it 
is only in mercy that we do not destroy it entirely. We shall 
kill and burn until the people come to know that our will is 
irresistible. Imperium et Libertas. Rule Britannia !" 

I am not making any general charge of cruelty against 
our soldiers and generals. We have no evidence that they 



AFGHANISTAN 167 

acted in the thirst for blood, nor in any lust of outrage. For- 
tunately things are not so bad as that. English gentlemen 
are not suddenly converted into Mouravieffs, Gallifets, and 
Chefket Pashas. Nor do I assert that they acted worse 
than soldiers always act who are left to themselves and 
permitted to hang civilians. Their moderation in hanging 
contrasts favourably with that of Russian or Turkish gen- 
erals suppressing an insurrection. My charge is a perfectly 
definite one. It is that they are permitted to hang people 
at all as rebels; that they should be suffered to set rewards 
on the heads of soldiers and generals who meet them in open 
battle; that they should be allowed to execute prisoners in 
cold blood (short of any case of specific murder proved 
against the criminal) ; that they have power by proclamation 
to convert the national defence of a free people into rebellion 
and mutiny; that they should be left to be the sole judges 
of what constituted this offence. Lastly, my complaint 
is that British officers sent to invade and conquer an inde- 
pendent people should be authorised to do so by terrorism 
— by the use, that is, not of their swords and rifles in battle, 
but by the rope and the torch when no one is left to fight. 

To all this the one defence is, as always — the prestige 
of our Indian Empire, the extreme paucity of our forces in 
Asia. They say, The troops we can spare to hold vast 
territories are so few, the importance of our Eastern Empire 
is so enormous, the difficulties of subduing vast mountain 
tracts with two or three thousand Europeans are so great 
that we cannot be bound by European law, that we can only 
exist — by terrorism in fact. Now to say that it is impossible 
to apply the public law of Europe in the East is no answer 
at all. Our very charge is, that they do apply the forms 
and fictions of European law, whenever it suits them, and 
just so far as it suits them, and throw these forms off the 



/ 



1 68 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

moment they tell on the wrong side. In dealing with Ori- 
ental races, it has become a settled practice with some Brit- 
ish Governments to assert and exact all the rights that can 
be grasped under the strict letter of European diplomacy, 
and to recognise none of the obligations and limits of Euro- 
pean law, whenever they cease to be convenient. 

The dilemma is this. If they go to Kabul under the 
^ rights of public law, they are acting there in defiance of public 
law. If they deny that public law can be applied to Afghans, 
how ludicrous is the plea of the sacred person of our envoy, 
the mutiny against a friendly prince, the constructive rebel- 
lion, and the ex post facto murders? The public law of 
Europe is, perhaps, in all its forms, or in all its rules, not 
capable of strict application in Asia. But to a civilised and 
honourable people that cannot mean that they are exempt 
from all law in Asia, from the spirit and principle of public 
law as well as from its forms; that cannot justify them in 
using the terms of public law in order to entrap and mystify 
Asiatic rulers, and then to laugh at the very essence of public 
law, if it hinders their own objects. To a great people at 
the head of modern civilisation, the difficulties of applying 
the public law of Europe to people in Asia involve most 
scrupulous care to follow that which is beyond and behind 
all public law in Europe, a real and healthy sense of equity, 
to look at the things as they are, to treat half-civilised races 
of different religion and habits, from the point of view of a 
wise understanding of their prejudices and their ignorances, 
to bear ourselves always as their guides in civilisation and 
justice. 

Now throughout this Afghan war (it is not the first nor 
the last war that has been waged by England on that plan) 
it is laid down on system that our troops are to enter the 
enemies' country, whether they be independent tribes, rebels, 






AFGHANISTAN 169 

mutineers, or robbers is immaterial ; in any case the country 
is treated as in " insurrection " and general outlawry; and, 
as the troops are too few to occupy and permanently hold 
so vast an area, they are to kill and burn, ravage and destroy, 
so far as may be requisite to secure submission. They are 
to behave just as Edward I. behaved when he was conquering 
Wales or invading Scotland, just as Caesar behaved in Gaul, 
or Cortes in Mexico. That is to say, they are to hold them- 
selves free from all the laws of war as understood in modern 
Europe; they are not bound to fight as civilised nations 
fight; if they are too few to subdue the country physically, 
they must terrorise it into submission; the end is conquest, 
and any means leading to that end are good. 

Now I say that no circumstances, no diplomatic outrages, 
no pieces of paper or treaties with mountain chiefs, can 
justify this system of conquest by terrorism. The spirit 
of evil is on it, everywhere and always ; in Asia, or in Europe, 
in the mountains of Afghanistan, or in the valleys of the 
Balkans. If your troops are too few to conquer and hold 
a territory, by the public laws of peace and of war, you 
should keep out of it; if the tribes you wish to annex do 
not understand modern diplomacy, it is no ground that you 
should sink to the morality of a hill chief. To tell us that 
the interests of India are paramount, and that to save our 
power and our credit there, all things are permitted, and 
that all morality is idle; this is indeed to demoralise the 
nation, to turn our Indian Empire into a curse greater to 
Englishmen than her Mexican and Peruvian conquests were 
to Spain ; it is to teach a free people the creed of the pirate. 
Let the old watchwords be erased from all English flags: 
Dieu et mon Droit — Honi soit — and the rest, are stale 
enough. We will have a new imperial standard for the new 
Empress of Asia, and emblazon on it — Imperium et Barbaries. 



170 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

It concerns the honour of this people, it especially concerns 
the credit of Parliament, that the political and international 
side of these foreign wars should not be resigned carte blanche 
to soldiers with a roving commission to conquer, free from 
all reference to the law of nations, and practically exempt 
from the rules of war. Above all, it is monstrous that they 
should be permitted to draw round them a strict cordon 
of secrecy, and exclude all information of an independent 
or civilian kind, even to the civilian government they serve. 
It is an idle pretence . that the secrecy was demanded in the 
military interests of the campaign. It was enforced to ex- 
clude criticism, to avoid observation, to withdraw the acts 
of the generals from the control of the civil government, 
of the Parliament, of the nation. 

No doubt generals in the field delight in nothing so much 
as in carte blanche, the exclusion of all political control, the 
suppression of all criticism, the absorption of every force 
civil, political, legal, and moral into the one convenient autoc- 
racy — Martial Law as understood at headquarters. Of 
course these heady captains, with the thirst of Alexander 
and Napoleon in their veins, would be only too happy to 
conquer all Asia on such terms, and career over the planet 
so long as at home we found them in men and in guns, and 
asked no awkward questions. But it behoves a responsible 
government and a free Parliament to beware that these men 
never shall be let loose on a province or a nation, to drag 
the name of England through blood and dust, to shut them- 
selves up in a sealed district on some idle military excuse, 
and then to set to work with fire and sword, gun and halter, 
until they have tamed another semi-civilised and indepen- 
dent people. Such things may cause joy in military clubs, 
and their admirers; it may delight those who believe that 
England can civilise the East by force; but it is utterly dis- 



AFGHANISTAN 171 

honouring to a nation such as England, and it disgusts and 
shames the manly spirit of our thoughtful working people. 

Again I say, I do not charge our soldiers and generals with 
promiscuous cruelty. Very far from it. I know and honour 
amongst them many most gentle and generous men. They 
often show conspicuous self-control, and a quiet mercifulness 
worthy of truly brave natures. They almost never lose 
their heads, and seldom indeed do they catch a blood lust 
like French or Turkish generals in an insurrection. Per- 
sonally at home we all know them as English gentlemen 
and just men. But I complain that they are often set to 
tasks such as no soldier should have given to him, and granted 
a licence such as should be trusted to no general. One 
could not trust the archangel Michael to be just, or the 
seraph Abdiel to be faithful, in a position so trying. 

Our soldiers are sent into a district, one against a thousand 
or ten thousand, usually heated with some tale of outrage 
to avenge, and knowing that nothing but desperate energy 
can enable them to win, despising their enemy as "niggers," 
and utterly unable to look on them as soldiers; they are 
sent into a province or a kingdom alone, without any politi- 
cal control or civilian witness, and they are simply ordered 
to chastise the rebels, or crush the resistance. What would 
have been the consequences had the Red Prince been let 
loose upon France without any civil control or witness, with 
orders carte blanche to bring Frenchmen to their senses, and 
to be his own Vattel and Foreign Secretary? Prince Bis- 
marck took care to keep his generals within bounds. Had 
he not done so, Europe would be ringing now with horror. 
What then must it be when soldiers, on fire to avenge some 
outrage, outnumbered as the Spaniards were outnumbered 
in Mexico, are sent in upon a " nigger" people, with all the 
physical loathing of race, and the inhuman prompting of 



172 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

their religion, to tame an insurgent tribe ? Angels could not 
be trusted to do the horrid work, and the natural result 
ensues. 

In spite of the conspicuous coolness and generosity of our 
soldiers, the fact remains that they never meet their equals 
or a civilised foe. A generation has passed since English- 
men met in fight white men, and even those were hardly of 
European civilisation. They never fight under the rules 
and conditions of modern war. They hardly ever fight 
with a foe, whom they treat as an honourable foreign enemy. 
They are for ever engaging in battues of black skins, red 
skins, brown skins, "niggers," or savages of some kind. 
Their enemies are almost always "rebels," or "mutineers," 
or "insurgents," or "marauders," with whom they do not 
pretend to hold the conventional laws of warfare. Our 
officers, therefore, are almost always partly executioners, 
and partly criminal police, as well as soldiers. They not 
only use their swords, but they have ever in their train ropes 
and halters, gibbets and cats, and all the apparatus of a 
Russian army in Poland. They seldom fight without kill- 
ing prisoners in cold blood after all resistance has ceased. 
They blow them from guns by platoons, they hang them 
from the first tree, they shoot them in squads, they flog 
them by scores, they burn villages wholesale; they hold 
drum-head courts-martial on priests and officials; they 
proclaim martial law at their own free-will. 1 

Again I repeat that I do not charge our officers or men 
with wanton cruelty, nor do I say that they become personally 
savage, except in rare cases. Nor do I say that they do these 
things without general orders, or without a very fair show 



1 Much of this has been repeated mutatis mutandis in our various African 
wars, where again we were fighting against raw levies and native races. 
See the Essay on Martial Law (1908). 



AFGHANISTAN 1 73 

of actual insurrection and real outrage. But this, as a fact, 
is the horrid work the British army is usually called on to 
do when it enters the field. It is one of the curses, no doubt, 
of our Empire ; one of the burdens to be borne by a nation 
which builds its greatness on vast continents of half -civilized 
people. I wonder that the fine stuff of English gentlemen 
can resist, as it does, the contagion. I am amazed that so 
few of them get brutalised by their work. There were men, 
we know, in Jamaica who seemed to delight in hanging and 
flogging the blacks. And I myself have heard a young 
officer say that what pulled him through a desperate wound 
in the Indian " Mutiny" was the crawling to the window 
each morning to see the niggers hung — the "niggers" being 
prisoners taken in the battle where he got his wound. 

But not the less necessary is it, for a civilised govern- 
ment and people, to control with a strong hand the appeal 
to military law. There is that of the wild beast in all fighting 
men heated with battle, that they ought almost never to 
be turned, with the blood still hot upon their hands, into 
governors, executioners, judges. This Martial Law is a 
big word for a black thing. It means terrorism, slaughter, 
violence — within such limits as a soldier thinks convenient. 
It is strange that of all nations on the earth, except possibly 
the Russian, the English nation is the one which most often 
proclaims Martial Law. The British army, of all armies 
in the world, is the one which is most often hanging, shooting, 
or punishing prisoners of war. And of all civil Governments 
on earth, unless, perhaps, that of the Czar, the Parliament 
of this free nation is the one which is the readiest to hand 
over countries and provinces to the absolute will of a soldier 
flushed with victory. 

If these words, quite undeniable as they are, cause pain 
and anger in the minds of honest men, the fault is not mine. 



174 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

I do not pretend to be a man of peace at any price, nor do 
I deny the necessity for soldiers and the duty of recognising 
war. But I have a right to appeal to the civilian sentiments 
of civilised citizens, and to ask that our army shall be held 
strictly in civil control and consistently used in a civilised 
spirit. No honourable soldier can refuse such a claim. 
As to the men of blood and of swagger, we care as little for 
their wrath as for their insolence. They cannot rise, as a 
French statesman said, to the level of our disdain. Men 
who fulfil their civil duties in the face of any opposition, 
need not be dismayed by the courage which hurries back to 
banquets, balls, and welcomes, from the slaughter of "nig- 
gers," from wild raids across savage districts in expeditions 
which, like a tiger hunt, combine at once a battue and a 
picnic. Such men entirely mistake the true temper of their 
fellow-citizens at home. The opinion of the profession or 
the narrow class that feeds it is not all in this island. There 
are serious men here, quite as eager for the honour of their 
country as they are, who have thought about war, its history, 
its duties, and trials as much as they have, who turn with 
a sick heart from this never-ending tale of invasion, slaughter, 
repression, military executions, and martial law. 

For a generation the Temple of Janus for us has hardly 
once been closed. No year passes that British troops are 
not fighting somewhere, and never a white or a civilised foe, 
and rarely indeed in civilised warfare. To us these men 
come home, yet honourable men no doubt, and unpolluted 
with savagery, but still reeking with the blood of men killed 
in unjust quarrels, of men put to death in cold blood, butch- 
ered in the loose hubbub of military retribution. Will some 
member of Parliament exact a true return of the prisoners 
taken in battle in these African and Asian wars, and of the 
punishments inflicted by military justice? How many of 



AFGHANISTAN 1 75 

the hundreds of thousands of fighting men who have so 
lately met our armies in battle, have been taken prisoners 
in the field? How many of such prisoners have been hon- 
ourably treated as Europeans treat European prisoners of 
war? What are these wars in which we never hear of pris- 
oners, in which prisoners of war are systematically tried by 
courts-martial? Have we no member on either side of our 
docile parties, who will tear open the secrets of the "military 
censor," and drag before the nation the true story of this 
hanging of "niggers"? 

There are men at home to whom these things are never 
gilded by displays of personal daring, who hear the groans 
of the prisoners in their agony amidst all the cheers of ad- 
miring friends. The vast mass of our working people, in 
town and in country, loathe these criminal wars, and turn 
from the instruments of these wild acts of retribution. Bella 
geri placuit, millos habitura triumphos, said the noble Ro- 
man ■ — there are wars too odious to deserve a triumph. 
Our soldiers too often forget this maxim, and the stern warn- 
ing it conveys. There is no response in the mass of the 
nation to the thoughtless cheers of the idle, when executioners 
and hangmen return to claim a triumph. They may have 
done their duty, and may have done it without passion: 
but we do not care to see them ; and we ask of the Govern- 
ment that sent them by what law or right these things were 
done. 

To all that is said there is always one monotonous reply 
— the prestige of our Asiatic position — the critical neces- 
sities of our Indian Empire. If this means, that having 
a great possession in the East, its importance is such that 
neither justice nor morality have anything to do with the 
matter, then this nation will sink to the Spain of the Philips, 
if it ever accepts such a doctrine. I know there are politi- 



176 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

cians on both sides who have quietly made up their minds, 
that having got India they mean to keep it by any means 
and all means which come to hand ; and whatever has to be 
paid in life, or in waste, in guilt, or in shame, will be paid to 
the bitter end. To such men we have but one short answer 
— we do not argue with Pirates : we call upon civilised 
mankind to judge them. 

It is just because we have a deep sense of all that we ought 
to do in India, it is just for the sake of India itself, that we 
condemn this military terrorism. It is not we who say — 
Perish India, or who crudely call out for its summary aban- 
donment. For my part, I recognise all the duties which 
our presence there has imposed on us, and I desire to fulfil 
those duties of good government and upright dealing at 
every sacrifice and with all our might. It is because I desire 
a just rule and the firm and peaceful settlement of India, 
such as may lead to the ultimate establishment of real native 
governments, that I protest against the system of these con- 
stant wars of retribution. How is the government of India 
ever to rise to the level of a just and beneficent power, or 
to educate its people to govern themselves, when, year after 
year, it is occupied in successive wars of aggression and 
repression, of terrorism or vengeance? How are officers to 
become the peaceful guardians of a contented empire, when 
they are for ever returning, hot with revenge and triumph, 
from a promiscuous battue of half-barbarous "rebels"? 

The day when the white and the dark race shall feel that 
they are fellow-citizens, instead of conquerors and conquered, 
masters and subjects, is indeed indefinitely adjourned by 
these wild raids amongst wild tribes in the spirit of Cortes 
or Pizarro. The bad blood which these raids enkindle in 
every vein, the desperate sense of race-feud which they breed 
in the native, and the fierce temper of disdain which they 



AFGHANISTAN 1 77 

rouse in us — these are the real perils and difficulties of 
the Indian Empire. Fed by this slaughter and violence and 
lawlessness, that empire will always be precarious, will 
always be sinking to a lower level. To believe that an 
empire can for ever subsist on terrorism, be the terrorism 
only in reserve, is to believe that the most cynical of Turkish 
Pashas or Russian Prefects are wise politicians and true 
patriots. 

If we are asked what do we mean by terrorism, the ques- 
tion is easily answered. Terrorism consists in the killing, 
torturing, or punishing A, not for any crime committed by 
A, but in order to terrify B, C, and D into submitting to 
your will. That is terrorism; and it is, always and every- 
where, evil and abominable, in Europe or in Asia. No 
circumstances can justify it. No object can excuse it. And 
that is what, we say, our troops have done in Kabul, and 
what our Government has authorised them to do. If it be 
objected that all war is terrorism, the answer again is simple. 
War has its recognised laws as much as peace, and they 
must be submitted to in Asia as much as in Europe. If 
it be said that they cannot be applied in Asia, or are not 
understood by barbarians, then the spirit of these laws must 
be followed, if we cannot follow their letter. They are 
laws like the laws of honour which bind soldiers as such, 
which distinguish them from pirates, banditti, and cut- 
throats, wherever they may fight. They are laws which 
ought to bind the British soldier as a part of his own self- 
respect, quite apart from their being enforced by adverse 
opinion, or formulated in words by the enemy. And the 
chief and centre of these laws are these : — Thou shalt not 
kill helpless prisoners of war; thou shalt not kill for civil 
offences, as distinct from military attack. Both are summed 
up in this. You may use your swords and your rifles in 



178 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

battle — you may not use gibbets and ropes in cold blood. 
And we tell these heroes of the drum-head and the halter 
that, whether it be in Asia or in Europe, in Africa or in 
America, they who do these things cease to be soldiers, and 
sink to the level of hangmen or cut-throats. Longitude and 
latitude have nothing to do with it: nor have the habits 
and ideas of the particular enemy. It is a matter of personal 
self-respect, binding on gentlemen and on soldiers every- 
where. 






VII 

THE ANTI-AGGRESSION LEAGUE 



Before the second ministry of Mr. Gladstone had been in power 
for two years, a movement was started to check the con- 
tinuance of the aggressive policy abroad which it was 
hoped the Mid-Lothian campaign had suppressed. It 
originated with Mr. Herbert Spencer, the late Lord 
Hobhouse, and many Members of Parliament, journalists, 
and political speakers who were dissatisfied with the Zulu 
and Transvaal wars, the Borneo annexation, and other 
expeditions. After many private meetings, a public 
conference took place in February 1882, at which Mr. 
John Morley presided, the speakers being himself, Mr. 
Herbert Spencer, Lord Hobhouse, several Liberal M.P.'s, 
and myself. Some twenty Members were present, in- 
cluding three who have been Cabinet Ministers in the 
present Administration. A full account of the speeches 
and of the policy of the League was published in March 
1882, entitled Anti- Aggression League Pamphlets, No. 1. 
It gave the names of some thirty-six Members and up- 
wards of forty Professors, writers, and politicians as 
forming the General Council. 

From this Pamphlet I extract a few sentences of the 
speech I made at the Conference (iqo8). 

The vast increase of the Empire in Asia and in Africa has 
been effected almost entirely by war. If we count up the 

179 



180 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

years since 1832, and set against each year the wars in which 
we have been engaged, we should find there were more wars 
than there were years ; that is, if now and then a year might 
be found free from war, the next gave us two, three, and 
even four wars for one year. If we take a period of fifty 
years, we shall find that in at least ten of these years we have 
been engaged in warlike expeditions in Africa; during ten 
of them we have been engaged in war with China. During 
eight of these years we have had wars with the Afghans; 
during ten years we were occupied with wars in India ; during 
four or five in New Zealand; and during as many more in 
Burmah, Japan, Persia, or Malayland. During fifty years 
I reckon that England has been engaged in more than 
forty distinct wars, without counting either the Crimean 
War or the constant sputtering of war with the Indian hill 
tribes. 

Between 1850 and i860 we were engaged in almost in- 
cessant war in every part of Asia, from the Black Sea to the 
Yellow Sea. The fact is that England is very rarely at peace, 
and has more wars than any other nation in Europe, not 
even excepting Russia. If we study the list of years of war, 
we see a very significant fact : there are some years in which 
these Asiatic, African, and Colonial wars seem suddenly 
to lull. They ceased during the three years of the great 
Crimean War ; they ceased after the great European revolu- 
tions of 1848 and 1849; they ceased during the great Ger- 
man war in 1866; and they ceased again during and after 
the great war in France of 1870-1871. During periods of 
great danger or watchfulness at home, they cease. That 
proves they are under our own control. We can abstain 
from them when our safety and policy demands it. The 
word is passed to our prancing pro-consuls and bold am- 
bassadors in Asia and in Africa that they must be quiet at 



THE ANTI- AGGRESSION LEAGUE l8l 

their peril, and immediately peace reigns on all our remote 
frontiers ! 

In old Rome there was the ancient Temple of Janus, 
with its gate open in time of war, and closed only in time of 
peace. I sometimes wish that we too had our Temple of 
Janus in Palace Yard, so that our senators, as they go down 
to take their places, might see the gate so continuously open, 
and might remember that we were still at war. 

Something more is needed to check war than the ques- 
tions or remonstrances of independent Members of Par- 
liament. They tell us how much they need support from 
without. And our movement just offers such support. 
It proposes a union of men of affairs with men who address 
opinion through the press, or by books, or by the pulpit. 
A persistent tendency to war, aggression, and commercial 
adventure can only be held in check by a systematic effort 
to maintain peace and international justice. The criticisms 
of politicians require behind them an organic and construc- 
tive theory of a policy fitted for an industrial and civilised 
age. We need a matured system of international morality 
— a practical scheme for an effective policy of Peace. 

Such we make bold to think may be found in the printed 
papers and programmes of the intended League, which will 
bring together men of influence in the House and the coun- 
try alongside of men like our Chairman and Mr. Herbert 
Spencer, who in their works have elaborated and illustrated 
the doctrines from the point of view of social philosophy. 
We contemplate no abstract Doctrine of Peace; no specific 
cut-and-dried scheme of constitutional change; no arbi- 
trary limitation of the Executive. We seek to make the 
Executive conscious of its responsibility to public opinion; 
not to impose chains on it in the exercise of its duty, but to 
make it feel that it will be judged according to its deserts. 



l82 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Nor are we hostile to the present Government. Our move- 
ment counts many of the warmest friends of it. But if we 
find men like Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, and Lord 
Hartington, so continually overpowered by the self-will of 
officials, or the interests of certain classes, we think they 
need help to enable them to maintain a policy of peace and 
justice. Had they had it, they might have found it easier 
to withdraw from the Transvaal and from Afghanistan, 
when they knew it was their duty to do so. 

II 

The new League was hardly constituted when in the summer 
of 1882 our entanglements in Egypt threatened to involve 
us in a new war with practical annexation. The League 
appealed to public opinion, and especially to the working 
class, to prevent such a catastrophe. A great meeting 
was held in the Memorial Hall on June 26, at ivhich I 
was asked to give an address to specially invited repre- 
sentatives of Trades Union and Labour Associations. It 
was published as Anti-Aggression League Pamphlets, 
No. 2. 
From this report I extract the following passages : — 

When, two years ago, the great appeal to the nation was 
made, we thought it was decided for ever that England 
should renounce the policy of injustice, and cease to under- 
take the control of half the human race in the name of civili- 
sation in general and Great Britain in particular. We were 
all, perhaps, a little too confident that the policy we rejected 
was really abandoned. Mr. Gladstone, and almost every 
member of his Ministry, and his supporters in the House, 
were pledged up to the eyes to repudiate it. But the authors 



THE ANTI- AGGRESSION LEAGUE 1 83 

and agents of the system remained. In a country like ours, 
with world-wide commercial interests, with n Empire that 
is scattered over the planet as no empire in history ever was, 
with traditions of conquest and domination, founded by 
war and maintained by enterprise, it was inevitable that the 
classes who had created and worked the system should 
struggle to maintain it. 

The zealous governors and fiery consuls, pushed on by 
the resident traders seeking new markets, the viceroys and 
envoys, and ambassadors, trained to dictate to kings, and 
to extend the Empire by policy or force, the adventurous 
spirits who form an irregular band of pioneers in advance 
of the limits of the Empire, the permanent foreign and colo- 
nial staff, all made it difficult for Mr. Gladstone and his 
party to carry out the pledges they had given. It needed 
incessant remonstrances from the Press and the people 
before Afghanistan, Kabul, and Candahar were finally got 
rid of ; the shameful war with the Basutos in Africa was still 
suffered to drag on ; the author of the Zulu war — Sir Bartle 
Frere — was not immediately recalled ; the unjust imprison- 
ment of the Zulu King was still enforced ; the unjust annexa- 
tion of the Transvaal country was still maintained, till it 
ended in a shameful and iniquitous war. 

The League, whose objects I am to present to you to- 
night, is far from designing any opposition to the Ministry 
of Mr. Gladstone, or any wish to embarrass it. We are 
most of us steady supporters of the Liberal party, and no 
man could more heartily desire than I did myself the great 
change in policy which brought Mr. Gladstone to power. 
And, with his work in Ireland and in the reform of our par- 
liamentary system still incomplete, no man could more 
honestly than I regard his fall as a national calamity. We 
are not acting, I say, with any desire whatever to embarrass 



184 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the Government. We are seeking only to remind them 
of their principles. People do not always like to be reminded 
of their principles ; but it is good for them — it is always 
good for them — and they very soon find out that those 
who do so are their best friends. 

Now, what are the principles of the Anti-Aggression 
League? Well, they are the principles of the Mid-Lothian 
campaign, of the Government of Mr. Gladstone : the prin- 
ciples that the nation ratified in May 1880. That is to say, 
that this policy of extending the Empire, aggrandising the 
power of Britain, thrusting ourselves as managers and mas- 
ters of our weaker neighbours, backing up our adventurous 
people in every enterprise, just or unjust, bullying the weak 
tribes, making petty kings our vassals, opening markets by 
gunboats, and maintaining controllers by ironclads — this 
system must cease, once for all. The Empire is a great deal 
too big and scattered and composite in itself to need any 
increase. He is the worst enemy of our country who seeks 
to make it wider and more difficult to defend. We have 
already more nations to manage and govern than we can 
succeed in governing well, and some very much nearer home 
than Africa. The adventures of our traders, whether in 
China or Japan, or South Africa or North Africa, or Aus- 
tralia, or the Pacific Islands, are often of a kind that cover 
us with shame as a nation, and add nothing but sorrow and 
trouble to our Governments. 

England, in spite of all our professions, is that country 
which, of all others, has the oftenest war on its hands, and 
is the oftenest engaged in crushing the efforts of some weaker 
people for independence. The German Empire, under Bis- 
marck, is a model of a peaceable nation compared to Eng- 
land; Russia herself has not so many wars, and all the 
military monarchies of the world put together are not so 



THE ANTI-AGGRESSION LEAGUE 1 85 

frequently engaged in fighting as our little island, shut off from 
the warlike people of Europe by the "silver streak." In 
fifty years we have been engaged in at least fifty wars, and 
a year hardly ever passes without military operations of 
some kind by sea or land. In theory every British Govern- 
ment is a firm friend of peace, and every party repudiates the 
idea of aggression. But, one after another, every Govern- 
ment finds war too tempting to be resisted. 

For these reasons the Anti- Aggression League has requested 
me to address a meeting of men who were chosen to represent 
the working classes and the mass of the industrious com- 
munity, and they have invited you to consider the appeal 
that I make to you for support and co-operation. This great 
issue of our age — the replacing of the old international 
policy of war, aggression, and rivalry by the new international 
policy that has yet to be of peace, forbearance, and mutual 
confidence — especially concerns the great labouring class 
of the community, and its best hopes lie in their help. You, 
if I may address myself directly to those here to-night, who 
represent the great political and social organisations of the 
workmen, their Trades Unions, their Co-operative Societies, 
their political clubs, and their educational institutes, you, I 
say, have nothing to gain and everything to lose by this policy 
of national aggrandisement. 

Your first interest is peace, for the horrors of war fall first 
and heaviest on you. You are the bulk of the people, who 
suffer most and first in times of national distress. You are 
not dazzled by the prizes and honours of an adventurous 
campaign. These new markets which our great merchants 
are ever seeking to "open up" only derange the labour mar- 
ket at home, bringing violent gambling in the employment of 
capital, to be followed by gluts, reaction, and slack trade 
upon an overstocked market and an overstimulated labour 



1 86 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

population. This civilisation which our official and our 
capitalist classes are ever eager to discharge wholesale upon 
some foreign people who seem very much to object to it ; this 
civilisation which they seem to think can be shot like the 
cargo in a ship, and not seldom like the charge in a cannon ; 
this "civilisation" is no interest of yours and no work of 
yours. 

You have nothing to gain by sacrificing your blood and 
savings in order that more traders may carry gunpowder and 
brandy and loaded calicoes further and further into the wilds 
of Africa; in order that the Czar may find himself check- 
mated in Central Asia; in order that the city of Alexander 
may be turned into a French or Italian town, and that the 
salaries of thousands of Europeans may be paid out of the 
taxes of Egypt. This continual stimulus to the aggressive 
instincts of the nation is a continual stimulus to the power 
of the military classes, and to all the retrograde elements in 
our political life. They strengthen the power and the oppor- 
tunities of those who maintain the older class prejudices of 
our people, and they retard the growth of industrial habits 
and aims. The policy of the people is bound to be a peace 
policy in the long run ; for it is only by peace that the con- 
dition of the people can possibly be raised, and it is only by 
a settled habit of peace that we can learn the habit of social 
justice, and the true solution of all our social problems. 

War, the rumour of war — the very breath of war — post- 
pones indefinitely the work of reforming our home abuses, 
our class anomalies, our ancient misgovernment. It post- 
pones the remedies, and it gives a new authority to the classes 
who are mainly responsible for the diseases. Tell those who 
are so fond of touring round the globe to import — (I would 
rather say to inflict) — their civilisation on the backward 
nations and tribes, tell them that you want civilisation here 



THE ANTI- AGGRESSION LEAGUE 1 87 

at home, if you can get it genuine. Tell those who are so 
eager to govern Arabs, and Africans, and Afghans, and 
Chinese at modest stipends of £4000 or £5000 a year — ask 
them to see what can be done in the better government of 
our own island. 

Before they settle the Eastern question, and the Central 
Asian mystery, and the great Euphrates Valley imbroglio, 
ask them to settle the land question in Ireland first, and then 
in Scotland and in England. Ask them to give the 4,000,000 
of hard-worked people of London the chance of drinking 
pure water; ask them to give the people of London some 
means of controlling their own affairs, and of providing for 
their own wants ; ask them to give a rational system of local 
government to the English and the Scotch and the Irish 
counties; ask them to do something to get our vast fabric 
of law out of the chaos of obscurity and confusion in which 
it is involved. Tell them that there are fifty burning social 
questions at home to solve, and wants of the English people 
to supply before they undertake to civilise the human race, 
and cause order and prosperity to reign in every corner of 
the old hemisphere, in every island at least of the new hemi- 
sphere. Tell those noisy philanthropists who call heaven 
and earth to witness of the "anarchy" on the Nile, the 
"anarchy" on the Balkans, and the murderous propensities 
of the Pacific islanders — tell them to go and do something 
to prevent anarchy in Ireland. Whilst "civilisation" is 
making the tour of the world on board ironclads with eighty- 
ton guns, civilisation is terribly wanted in the three kingdoms 
at home. These "crises" and "demonstrations" suspend 
your interests and silence your claims. The old Roman 
said, "In the midst of arms the laws are silent." Silent is 
law in every sense, and the reforming of law, and the making 
of good laws most silent of all. 



1 88 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Our Prime Minister, not many years ago, set down some 
twenty-seven questions which he said were of vital and 
immediate moment to the people, and urgently awaited the 
attention of Parliament. Is one of the twenty-seven ever 
heard of in the midst of a "crisis," on the eve or even in the 
moment of a war, when the whole attention of Parliament 
and the Ministry is strained after some fierce international 
struggle? The hope of land reform, of law reform, of 
municipal reform, of county reform, even of the supply of 
wholesome water, is adjourned Session after Session. 
Ireland — and Ireland is only a case of old international 
oppression — thrusts out everything, and now the condition 
of Egypt is even more urgent than that of Ireland; and if 
this terrible imbroglio on the Nile were to land us in a Euro- 
pean war, it would be years and years before we ever heard 
again of any one of Mr. Gladstone's twenty- seven burning 
questions. Therefore it is, I say, that peace, international 
justice, and quiet relations with all our neighbours, are the 
first of all the interests of the workmen. They alone of the 
community can make their voice heard without any preju- 
dice ; they lose most heavily by war, both in what they im- 
mediately suffer and in what they have to surrender. They 
may leave their bones to wither on distant lands, but they 
bring back no fortunes, no honours, no new markets for their 
capital, no new posts for their class. They only can speak 
out boldly and with the irresistible voice of conscience, be- 
cause they only have no interest in injustice, nothing to gain 
by conquest, and everything to lose by interference. 



VIII 

EGYPT 

(1882) 

i" then applied these principles to the Egyptian imbroglio. 

Now I ask you to apply these principles to the present crisis 
in Egypt. In what I have hitherto said, I have been express- 
ing the views of the League in whose name I have spoken 
to-night. But in all that I may say, on the immediate cause 
of this crisis, and on the practical policy to pursue, I would 
rather be taken to express my own personal opinion, and not 
the view of any group whatever. What the League thinks on 
the crisis may be seen in their published statement. I should 
like to add something to that statement on my own re- 
sponsibility. 

What has led to the existing stage of crisis in Egypt ? For 
a long time past, as you know, the European nations have 
been running a race together as to which should be foremost 
in pressing upon Egypt its civilisation and its protection. 
Their civilisation took the form at first of enormous loans of 
money at high interest, which the civilisers advanced to the 
rulers of Egypt in the philanthropic spirit in which Mr. 
Ralph Nickleby advanced cash to his pupils. These boun- 
ties of "civilisation" amount altogether to some £115,000,000. 
Then the civilisers, when they found the country utterly 
sinking under this gigantic burden of debt, and racked by 
the most odious misgovernment, were good enough to invite 



190 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

themselves to fulfil various offices at large salaries to keep 
things a little straight. By a parliamentary paper just pub- 
lished, we learn the names, and offices, and salaries of this 
vast army of European officials paid out of the taxes of the 
people of Egypt. Their total number is 1325 ; their total 
salaries amount to £373,704, about one-twelfth part of the 
entire available expenditure of the country. The number of 
the European civilisers is some 60,000 or (some say) 100,000. 
In consideration of their beneficent mission, these European 
missionaries of good works at 10 per cent have been exempt 
from local taxation. A native pays a tax of 12 per cent 
annual value on his house ; the European lives tax-free. 
The native fly-driver pays a heavy tax on his carriage ; the 
European banker drives his pair tax-free. Next, the civil- 
isers having obliged the country with some 115 millions 
sterling at 7 and 10 per cent, obtained "concessions" for 
about thirty-five millions more. Then they kindly exempted 
themselves from taxation, were good enough to set up local 
courts in which they had the right to bring their civil and 
criminal affairs to a judge of their own nation. An army of 
European judges, and secretaries, and assessors, and bar- 
risters were called in at very liberal salaries, who kindly 
undertook to do the law for the Egyptian people. 

The civilisers, of course, could not flood the country with 
their gold, make themselves free of local taxation, free of 
local jurisdiction, without coming into political conflicts 
with the Egyptian Government and people, as well as with 
one another. One Khedive or ruler of Egypt was dethroned 
by the pressure put by the European Powers on the Sultan 
of Turkey ; another was put in his place who well understood 
that he would be protected only so long as he did what he 
was told. And to maintain this system the notable device 
of the Control was set up. England and France have the 



EGYPT 191 

right to send out each a Controller or official who shall 
supervise the entire expenditure of the country, provide for 
due payment of the foreign debt, and regulate and control 
the Budget. The Controllers are the two foreign Chan- 
cellors of the Exchequer, as it were, to the Egyptians. The 
whole financial system of the country is under their super- 
vision. They are practically in the position of the House of 
Commons here, having ultimate control of the purse. Tech- 
nically, I know they have no veto ; but as every item of the 
Budget passes in review before them, and as they can object 
to any item they please, the Controllers are really the irre- 
sponsible rulers of Egypt. Each Controller receives a salary 
of nearly £4000 a year, and the entire cost of this one institu- 
tion is £14,000 a year. 

There are two other Controls, so that the Egyptian people 
pay about £30,000 a year for the luxury of not being allowed 
to raise or to expend their own taxes as they please, for fear 
that their foreign creditors may not get the whole of their 
four and a half millions of interest. The population of 
Egypt is much less than ten millions; and the revenue of 
this very poor people is nine or ten millions, or some £1 per 
head. The taxation of the people of India (and we are 
often told that it is as high as it can possibly be raised) is 
about 4s. per head — that of the Egyptian fellah about five 
times as much. Of this nine millions about one-half is car- 
ried straight out of the country to pay the foreign usurer, 
and only one-half of the total revenue is available for the 
administration of the country itself. Imagine your own 
feelings, if you had to send every year some forty millions 
sterling out of the taxes of the country to pay Turkish, or 
Arab, or Chinese bond-holders; and then, having paid that 
regularly, that you had to keep a Turkish pasha and a 
Chinese mandarin in London to control your expenditure, 



192 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

so that every penny of the Budget had to get the sanction of 
their excellencies, and if Mr. Gladstone or any other Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer wished to put on or take off a tax, 
down would come a fleet of ironclads from the Bosphorus into 
the Thames, and train their 80-ton guns right in view of the 
Tower and Somerset House. That is the state of Egypt 
now. 

Egypt is a very poor and a shamefully ill-governed coun- 
try. The fellah or peasant of the Nile is one of the poorest, 
the most patient, ill-used, the most hopeless of all the culti- 
vators of the soil to be found on this wide earth — outside 
of Ireland. For centuries he has been the prey of oppressors 
and tax-gatherers. But the worst exactions of his native 
Mahometan tax-gatherers never imposed on him so hopeless 
a burden as the cool, scientific, book-keeping sort of spolia- 
tion of his European civilisers. 1 

All this, be it remembered, is duly settled by high and 
mighty treaties. You hear much, you will hear more, of 
these international engagements, of firmans, and treaties, 
and obligations, and decrees, and what not. It is all as tight 
and technical as international lawyers can make it, just as 
tight and legal as Mr. Nickleby's bill transactions with 
young heirs. The Sultan has been bullied, and coaxed, and 
influenced. The Khedive has been coaxed and warned. 
There are bipartite treaties, and quadruple treaties, and all 
sorts of grand European proceedings. But the long and 
the short of it is this : Europeans having encouraged a 
profligate and unscrupulous Turkish Pasha, the late Khedive, 
in a career of incredible extravagance and folly, have forced 
another profligate and unscrupulous Turk — the late Sultan 

1 I quite admit that from the purely material point of view much of this 
has been remedied and the condition of the fellah has been immensely im- 
proved — but with corresponding evils (1908). 



EGYPT I93 

of Constantinople — to fling over the first old scoundrel, to 
bind over the country to all eternity to pay his scandalous 
debts, to set up a nominee and agent of the creditors as a 
new ruler of the country, and have taken the practical gov- 
ernment of the country into their own hands in order to make 
sure that the interest of these loans shall be regularly paid. 
The same thing has happened in Egypt which happens in 
real life. The spendthrift heir to a property goes to the 
Jews to supply his extravagance and follies. They fool him 
to the top of his bent, and lend him any sum he likes at any 
usurious rate they can compel him to accept. The crash 
comes, and then they come into possession; they get a 
receiver of his property ; and they squeeze his tenants to get 
their interest. 

Well, the bond-holders are now in possession of Egypt; 
or rather, they were the other day, till they beat a hasty 
retreat. That is the real meaning of this Egyptian mystery. 
We hear a great deal about international duties, about the 
Canal, and the interest of England in her Indian Empire ! 
All that is idle talk, that is wide of the true facts. It is quite 
true that the Canal is a matter of great importance to Eng- 
lish commerce. But no one has threatened it. The Canal 
is more than 100 miles from Alexandria, separated by 50 
miles of impassable and uninhabited desert from the cul- 
tivable soil of Egypt. But does it follow, that because we 
have an interest to sail our ships freely through the Canal, 
that the ruler of Egypt is to be our mere puppet — that we 
are to undertake the moral and material control of a popula- 
tion of five millions in a country as vast as France, that we 
are to establish in the country a huge national debt, a huge 
army of foreign officials of our own; that we are to control 
the Budget, and meddle with their politics, make Ministries, 
and dynasties, and unmake them when we don't feel quite 



194 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

satisfied that they are looking after our money? And all 
this, forsooth, in order that our ships may sail through a 
canal ioo miles off ! 

Naturally this " spoiling" of the Egyptians, which they 
now call " exploitation," this control and dry-nursing, roused 
native hostility. Strange to say, the Egyptians grew sulky 
at so much civilisation. The 1300 civilisers, paid £373,000 
per annum out of their taxes, seemed a little overdone; the 
60,000 Europeans living tax-free; the local courts of alien 
law and foreign judges; the 4 \ millions (half the total reve- 
nue) carried off to foreign bond-holders. The Mahometan 
population conceived what is called a "fanatical" objection 
to the foreigners; they even blasphemed the value of the 
civilisation ; they murmured it was rather too dear, and they 
talked about a Parliament. For some time the head of this 
movement was in the native army, headed by a native gen- 
tleman, Arabi Pasha. A Parliament was called, and soon 
began a struggle between the Parliament, the Army, the 
University, and the native leaders on the one side, and the 
Khedive, some of his official world, and the European ring of 
civilisers on the other. The ring, and when I say the ring 
I mean the 1300 European salaried officers of the Egyptian 
Government and their belongings, the agents of the banks, 
and railways, gas works, and other concessions of 35 millions, 
and the European population which had planted itself in 
Egypt — the ring, I say, chose to treat the native movement 
as a military rebellion. 

For months the Press, the Foreign Offices, and political 
world of Europe have been deluged with outcries that it was 
all the work of mutinous soldiers. It suited the ring to call 
a national movement, provoked by their meddling, a mutiny. 
Unhappily our public representatives took side against the" 
leaders ; they misled our Foreign Office ; they openly avowed 



EGYPT 195 

their hostility to the native party. The English representa- 
tives refused to recognise its chief, and plotted his downfall ; 
and to fall in the East is usually to be killed or exiled. It is 
as if, in the struggle in France in 1877 between Gambetta 
and the Republican party and Marshal MacMahon and his 
Ministry, Lord Lyons and the English Embassy had entered 
into the struggle, and had eagerly stimulated the Marshal to 
crush the Republic. The pretext that the movement was 
a military mutiny is a wild and silly calumny. Events have 
proved it ; the strength of the movement is not military, but 
civil. It lies in the great university or school of Cairo, the 
intellectual centre of the Mussulman world, with nearly 
20,000 members. It lies in the intelligent people of the city 
and the headmen of the villages. Events have proved, I 
say, how idle is this cry of a military mutiny. If it were so, 
why has the national Parliament placed itself in the front; 
why is it that we are told that Europeans are hardly safe in 
a village, whilst the whole army is now at Alexandria ? Egypt 
is not the first nor the only place where a national rising 
against a corrupt monarchy has been headed and represented 
by soldiers. 

We know something ourselves about political colonels 
who stood up by the cause of the people. But military 
mutiny or not, the cause of Arabi succeeded, in spite of the 
hostility, the intrigues, and the threats of the European 
Consuls and the European Controllers. The Khedive did 
not take the advice of the English Controller and did not 
arrest Arabi; but Arabi's affection for the Control was, of 
course, not increased by the advice. He became, however, 
the leading Minister of the Khedive, and proceeded to carry 
out a number of changes in the Egyptian army and the 
Egyptian finances. Now, I am not concerned to argue that 
Arabi's measures were wise or good. Perhaps he is not as 



196 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

admirable a War Minister as Mr. Childers, or as consum- 
mate a financier as Mr. Gladstone. But he was, for the 
time being, the lawful Minister of Egypt, and he was dealing 
with the details of Egyptian administration. Now the one 
thing that the British officials in Egypt will not tolerate is 
that Egyptians should deal with the details of Egyptian 
administration in any way but what the officials like. Our 
Controller in Egypt is an Indian official. He is paid nearly 
£4000 a year out of the Egyptian taxes to prevent the Egyp- 
tians from spending their revenue as they like. The English 
Controller, I say, seems to look upon himself as the resident 
at an Indian Rajah's Court — his practical tutor and master. 
There are three of these separate controls in Egypt, and 
the principal Controller seems to assume the position of 
superintending Providence. To such lengths does this med- 
dling go, that you will find in the Blue-books a high inter- 
national question made of some articles in the native papers. 
The English Envoy demands and obtains the suppression of 
two native journals for two articles set out in the Blue-book, 
which simply (and I think very reasonably) express the irri- 
tation of the native mind at the European exploitation of 
their country. From November last the story is the same 
— the Consuls and Controllers interfering in every detail of 
government, thwarting the formation of the national party, 
openly instigating the Khedive to crush Arabi, intriguing 
with his political rivals, and seeking to destroy the influence 
of the Chamber. The part taken by the British authorities 
in Egypt was the part taken in France in 1877, by the reac- 
tionary Monarchic and Imperialist parties, to crush Gambetta 
and the Republic, with this difference, that in Egypt it was 
the act of a foreign and avowedly friendly Government. At 
last the British Government took that fatal step of sending 
a powerful fleet to Alexandria, and under its guns demanding 



EGYPT 197 

by an ultimatum the dismissal of Arabi, his exile, the break- 
up of his party, and the reconstitution of the old system of 
nursing. 

Lord Granville was warned on many sides that this would 
certainly produce a dangerous excitement; you will find in 
Blue-book No. 7 that Lord Granville was informed, and 
repeated to France, "that the political advantages of the 
demonstration by the fleet outweighed the danger it would 
cause to the Europeans in Egypt." The fleet, as we know, 
utterly failed to effect the object sought. The Egyptians 
were not cowed by it; they were roused to fury by it. I 
honour the Egyptian people that they were capable of such 
manly indignation. Where should we be if the Czar and the 
French Republic sent a fleet into the Thames, and in front 
of the Tower served an ultimatum on the Queen, to send Mr. 
Gladstone to Australia, to dismiss the House of Commons, 
and to restore Lord Salisbury, with a French and Russian 
dry-nurse to control him ! Well, the Egyptians have feelings, 
and they resented, as was natural, this insolent and impotent 
menace. What followed ? The Government — the Gov- 
ernment of Mr. Gladstone — actually went to the Sultan 
of Turkey and implored him to send an official armed with 
his Imperial authority to crush the national party and restore 
the dry-nurse system. In the history of national humiliation 
I know nothing so tragic as that the Government of Mr. 
Gladstone should go on its knees to the despot at Con- 
stantinople and crush out the rising hopes of a people strug- 
gling into some kind of independence and life. The Gov- 
ernment well knew what crushing Arabi meant. To crush 
a national leader in the Sultan's dominions is to kill him. A 
man was chosen, well known to be one of the most un- 
scrupulous ruffians of the Pashas, and words can hardly ex- 
ceed that ! They were warned that the Pasha sent out was 



I98 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

at once treacherous, reckless, and merciless. The Govern- 
ment wanted Arabi to be made away with ! Well, he was 
too much for them — too much for Dervish, and the Sultan, 
and the Khedive, and the British and French fleets. 

We all know what followed. The Egyptian army and 
people were stung to frenzy by this attempt on the part of 
their foreign creditors, first to crush a legitimate national 
movement towards representative government, by cannon, and 
then the attempt to crush it by the force of Sultan and Pasha. 
A horrible, savage, and most abominable massacre resulted. 
I am not about to defend or to palliate any massacre; and 
this one was cruel and brutal enough. But let us remember 
that the Italian nation, with its political and intellectual 
leaders, with Garibaldi at their head, have just been cele- 
brating, six hundred years after the event, the great massacre 
of the French in Sicily, known as the Sicilian Vespers. That 
is now held in Italy to be a glorious event. Well, I do not 
think so. But I say that the massacre in Alexandria on the 
nth inst. was not unlike the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, 
except only that it was not one-hundredth part so bloody, 
and that it had the additional excuse of religious fanaticism. 
I deplore the innocent blood that was then shed; but I say 
that the British Government did everything that men could 
do to make a massacre probable; they were warned that a 
massacre was more than probable; and they urged the 
French Government to go on, as the political advantages to 
be gained outweighed the risk of massacre. 

And now what are we going to do? 30,000 or 40,000 
Europeans have left the country. Perhaps nearly as many 
remain. The Control has broken down, the dry-nursing 
system has come to an end. There let it stay. Let the 
Europeans who have left Egypt stay away. If they have 
made themselves intolerable to the Egyptian people, let them 



EGYPT 199 

take the consequences. If they have sunk their money in 
Egypt, that is their affair ; if they have gambled in Egyptian 
bonds, I cannot say I particularly pity them. But the system 
of taking into our hands the entire administration of Egypt, 
receiving its taxes, paying ourselves for the trouble of getting 
our money, nursing the native government, using the native 
ruler as our mere puppet, treating Egypt in fact as a con- 
quered country, has broken down. I am glad it has. It was 
a curse to Egypt, to the world, and to England. 1 Our Indian 
officials, civil and military, and all whom they influence, and 
all our military, and half our civil service, have come to think 
that anything which is convenient for India is right, and 
just, and necessary. Egypt lies on the road to India, and 
so Egypt must be made dependent, nursed if need be, but 
also annexed and conquered if need be. 

I am coming to look on our Indian empire as one of the 
greatest burdens that ever befell a nation, if India is the 
eternal excuse for every injustice, every aggression, and any 
crime. These Indian habits and ideas have corrupted our 
soldiers, our officials, our Ministries, our Parliament. Men 
who rule 240 millions think another 10 millions of slaves a 
mere trifle. They get to look on all Orientals equally as 
"niggers." When you read the despatches of Sir A. Colvin, 
you see that he treats the Khedive as a dependent Rajah, 
and Egypt as if it were part and parcel of the Indian empire. 
Talk to these Indian soldiers and you hear them say that of 
course Egypt lies so much in the way, that one day we must 
take it ourselves. Others talk about a Sepoy army from 
Bombay and a little of the rough and ready justice of Kabul. 
Are they quite sure that a native army of Indians can be 



1 The occupation and administration of Egypt has been renewed, under 
better conditions, but the inherent evils of the system are as evil as ever — 
as dangerous as ever (1908). 



200 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

trusted to fight their co-religionists in Egypt ? — that Arabi 
may not raise the flag of the Prophet in a way that may 
vibrate through Asia, and rouse all the dormant enthusiasm 
of the servants of Islam? Are they quite sure that Europe 
will stand by and see Sepoys in possession of the Nile and of 
Alexandria, and will suffer English generals to hang the native 
officers and leaders as easily as we hung the Afghan officers 
and leaders at Kabul? 

And all this wild and criminal bluster is supposed to be 
justified by the one word — the Canal. Well, the Canal is 
not a British river ; it is an ocean highway open to the world. 
The covetous rivalry of European Powers to possess Egypt 
existed long before the Canal was thought of, and will con- 
tinue, even if the Canal were to disappear. When Napoleon 
and Pitt fought for Egypt, there was no Canal, and Egypt 
was not even the road to India ! When Palmerston and 
Thiers fought the old Egyptian question in Mehemet Ali's 
time, there was no Canal. The French, at times, have been 
just as eager to dominate Egypt as we are, and so have the 
Italians and the Russians, and yet neither Power has any 
especial concern with the Canal. The Canal is a miserable 
excuse, just as the Bosphorus was, or Cyprus was and is ! 
The Egyptian people live miles away from the Canal; the 
possession of Egypt is in no way necessary to the free use of 
the Canal ; and a series of bloody struggles for the possession 
of Egypt is the worst and most costly and most criminal way 
to secure the use of the Canal. How miserable a pretext it 
is that the sole object is to secure the Canal is shown by this : 
When Mr. Gladstone formally defined in Parliament the 
objects of the Conference, he expressly said that the Canal 
was not one of them. When he stated the ends of British 
policy, he said nothing about the Canal. He mentioned three 
objects, not one of which is a national concern of ours, and 



EGYPT 201 

what was the fourth object as he stated then ? He then stated 
the true one — the money interest of certain bondholders and 
shareholders. 

It is a miserable fiction to tell us that all this elaborate 
system of the three Controls, the international tribunals, and 
the various rights under the firmans, is aimed at securing the 
passage of English ships through the Canal. It is a system 
for plundering the Egyptians, for riveting on them the chains 
of that debt-slavery which is regarded as their permanent 
and natural condition. The Greek philosopher thought that 
all non-Greeks were naturally slaves; and so the British 
financier looks on the Egyptians as naturally debt-slaves. 
The firmans and decrees and treaties which have been wrung 
from the weakness and the cupidity of Sultan and Khedive 
are an elaborate system for handing over the Egyptians to 
their European creditors. It is an enormity to saddle a 
wretched body of peasants, as poor as any Asiatics, with a 
nominal debt of ioo millions, nearly as much as the whole 
debt of India with its 240 millions, more than the debt of 
Prussia and many of the rich and powerful nations of Europe. 
It is an enormity to tax the fellah of the Nile nearly £1 per 
head, the taxation of the Russian people, five times that of 
the Indian. And a still greater enormity to carry off to 
Europe half of the entire revenue of the country. 

This is organised plunder and extortion. No treaties, or 
firmans, or decrees can make it just or reasonable in the eyes 
of morality. Is it conceivable that this country can be about 
to proceed to the desperate crime of attempting by war to 
restore this apparatus of extortion ? What is it to the people 
and Government of this country that a dozen banking firms 
of Paris and London, and their clients, should lose some of 
that money which they recklessly placed at usury? Why is 
it that the blood and money of our people are to be poured 



202 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

out in order to maintain the speculators who have farmed 
the taxes of the fellah, and the officials who have forced 
themselves on the ruler of Egypt ? I am far from demanding 
repudiation of the debt, gigantic as it is, and unscrupulous 
as it is for us to saddle the Egyptian people with the follies 
of a few vicious Turks. I do not ask for the dismissal of 
the Europeans whom the Egyptians desire to retain in their 
service. But I ask that this nation shall leave the usurers 
and the Egyptian people to settle it. I protest against the 
iniquity of engaging in war, jointly with European Powers, 
or making the Turk our agent, or singly ourselves. I pro- 
test against the firing one shot or the spending one penny to 
restore a system which has broken down, to replace Euro- 
peans who have run away, and to set on its legs again the 
legalised plunder of Egypt. 

It is no business of ours to assist speculators in getting their 
7 per cent by using the fiction of European law to an Oriental 
and Mahometan people. We have, as a nation, no concern 
in securing the salaries of a crowd of adventurous Europeans 
who have forced themselves into good berths at Alexandria 
and Cairo. The air is full of grand reasons of state. We 
hear of international treaties, the rivalry of nations, and the 
paramount British interest of India. Thrust these solemn 
impostures aside even when they are repeated with a grand 
air by that new convert to Jingoism, the Pall Mall Gazette. 
Whatever there may be in these things, there is one thing 
paramount over all — that it is an infamy to use the armed 
might of England to do the dirty work of rings of financial 
speculators and adventurous place-hunters. It would be an 
indelible shame on us to crush back into the slavery of the 
other subjects of the Sultan a people who are just stirring 
towards national life and freedom. I cannot believe that a 
statesman so keen as Lord Granville will ever commit the 



EGYPT 



203 



folly of reviving that system of nursing Egypt of which he 
has himself pointed out all the evils. And I will not think 
that a Government of which Mr. Gladstone is the chief can 
be about to enter on a European war (for it may mean that) 
to crush out in blood and tyranny a weak but inoffensive 
people for the sake of an organised and cruel system of un- 
scrupulous money-lending. 

Tell them that their own eloquent protests against Turkish 
misrule, Russian and Austrian misrule, will fall back on 
them like coals of fire on their heads. It is not the misrule 
of the Turks, it is Englishmen fighting to rivet on a weak 
people the chains of a debt-slavery. For my part, I will not 
believe it. It would be too dark a close for the political life 
of Mr. Gladstone. For my part, I am ready to leave Egypt 
for the Egyptians. It would be monstrous that this country 
should be dragged into the attempted conquest of a difficult 
country as large as France or Germany on the stale and taw- 
dry pretext that it is required for our prestige. Let us all 
appeal from the Ministers in office in 1882 to those same 
Ministers in opposition in 1880. Let us make it impossible 
ever to say that we were thrust into a wanton and unjust 
shedding of blood solely because our Foreign Office had 
received a merited rebuff and our navy had been paraded in 
a foolish and futile menace. 



An Appeal to Mr. Gladstone 

{July 1, 1882) 

The foregoing Address had hardly been published and widely 
circulated when I issued an open letter to Mr. Glad- 
stone, which reached him just before the bombardment 



204 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

of Alexandria , the prelude to the iniquitous conquest of 
Egypt. 

I reissue it after twenty-six years have passed, because 
all that has taken place since justifies, in my pinion, the 
fears I then expressed, and proves the soundness of the 
principles I then maintained. 

In spite of the immense improvement in the material 
condition of Egypt and the admirable results obtained by 
the eminent statesmen and the beneficent institutions that 
our rule has established on the whole valley of the Nile, 
the inherent evils of conquest and annexation remain and 
fester in that land. 

I repeat these protests and I recall these principles of 
international morality because the same evil courses have 
been constantly followed by England in Burmah, in 
Tibet, in China, in South Africa, as well as by Russia, 
Germany, Italy, and most conspicuously are still being 
attempted by France in Morocco (1908). 

Sir — I venture respectfully to address you in a time 
of crisis, when the reputation of your whole life is at stake 
— and not merely your reputation as a statesman, but as 
a man. Every principle that moved you in the most famous 
effort of your political career, as well as every profession 
that made you the most popular Minister of this century, 
now draws you to the side of justice and peace. You are 
being drawn to the side of oppression and war by interests 
and motives, the strength of which I make no attempt to 
deny, and the difficulty of resting which is extraordinarily 
great. 

Almost every sentence that you uttered in the most memor- 
able campaign of modern politics would serve my turn, if 
criticism were my purpose. But I have too deep a sense 



EGYPT 



205 



of the sincerity of those noble counsels you gave to the nation 
but two years ago, to charge you lightly with inconsistency; 
and I know the complications of the crisis too well to look 
on it as any plain and clear matter. The crisis in Egypt 
imposes on English statesmen a dilemma as painful as ever 
harassed a Minister; and just and wise men of the same 
way of thinking, we know, come to different conclusions 
thereon. I shall waste no time in quoting from your speeches, 
nor in establishing general maxims. The question for us 
all to-day is whether the peculiar circumstances of Egypt 
justify a policy which you have taught our people to re- 
pudiate elsewhere. Is Egypt a real exception to the principle, 
that British interests shall be no pretext for international 
injustice ? 

Here a compromise with principle which is easy to many 
statesmen is not possible to you. The passion with which 
you exhorted the nation to throw off the evil system of the 
past sprung from a truly religious impulse in your own heart, 
a loathing for wickedness, a spiritual sense of moral rather 
than material interests. Having lifted up your* voice with 
a power over the people that has never been equalled by 
any English statesman, and with a religious fervour for 
right which is hardly ever brought into politics, you cannot 
in your old age launch the nation on a new career of inter- 
national crime without covering your life with a stain. It 
would be not so much a mistake in policy as a recantation 
of faith. 

All then turns on the issue, whether the special conditions 
of Egypt make that policy a duty there which is a crime 
elsewhere ; whether the theories of Lord Beaconsfield were 
wrong rather in this, that they were applied on the Danube 
instead of the Nile. As a general principle all is plain; 
as a matter of duty your own position is notorious. Men 



206 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

say, and some of those whom you most trust, that this partic- 
ular case is a peculiar exception; that the real condition 
is not the apparent one; that the true dangers and interests 
are unknown to the public; that there are higher interests 
even than right and good faith ; that there is a subtlety about 
this Egyptian problem which is lost on the vulgar mind. 
All this may be true ; but the burden of proof rests on those 
who assert the exception; and it will require all your skill, 
if the nation is not to feel its conscience wounded and its 
self-respect lowered by a sudden change of front in the hour 
of temptation. 

There is about all attempts to justify aggression in Egypt 
that same vagueness and uncertainty of ground, that juggling 
with reasons, and that appeal to contradictory motives 
which we have heard so often in Turkey or Kabul, the 
Greek islands and Cyprus. It is even greater. The ad- 
vocates of aggression do not rely steadily on any one of these. 
India, the Empire, British interests, commerce, our country- 
men in personal danger, English capital sunk in Africa, the 
large financial interests at stake, our international obliga- 
tions, the harmony of Europe, the cause of good govern- 
ment, the emancipation of the slaves, the amelioration of 
the lot of the fellah, the jealousies and ambition of France, 
with a general background of " civilisation," make up the 
shifting reasons for the one solid end, which is — military 
operations on Egyptian soil. It is the old story; the same 
grand phrases which so often did duty on the Danube and 
the Bosphorus, on the Vaal and the Indus. You tore 
them, sir, into shreds and patches in Mid-Lothian. Can 
these rags now obscure your sight? 

Grapple with any one of these reasons, and the advocates 
of war straightway fall back on another. If we deny that 
the Indian Empire involves the British occupation of every 



EGYPT 207 

country that lies in the way, they refer us to the financial 
interests we have in Egypt. If we deny that it is the business 
of the state to collect debts, we are told that it is not the 
interest of the bondholders so much as the danger of French 
conquest. When we say that France is clearly opposed to 
war, then we have rehearsed to us the story of British capital 
invested in business, civilisation, and the poor fellah. These 
things are, some of them, desirable objects enough, but 
separated by a gulf from any connection with English con- 
quest; or they are private matters in which the state has 
no concern; or they are mere phrases or bugbears. The 
people who affect the higher politics shake their heads, 
and ask if we have heard of that despatch. There is the 
old hollow assumption of superior information and fore- 
sight. "Serious" politicians, as they love to call themselves, 
ask us volatile persons if we know all that there is behind 
Tewfik, Arabi, and Dervisch, and what the French Consul 
is aiming at, and what the Intelligence Department has 
just heard. They shuffle these objects and motives back- 
wards and forwards, and nimbly avoid a real probing of 
any one. You, sir, have shown us that the peace and good 
name of a great people are not to be bemouthed away by 
diplomatic brag. When you tore up all this artificial net- 
work of injustice, you made it impossible for the nation to 
have it woven again under its eyes. 

It cannot escape you that these counsels of crime are 
not brought to us by pure hands. It is not politicians of 
wisdom and experience who call for the establishment of 
British power in Egypt. It is money-lenders and share- 
holders. There are in England and in France groups of 
very rich men with enormous financial interests in that 
country. Four millions and a half yearly is paid to them 
on loans alone. They have further invested an immense 



208 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

sum — as much, we are told, as thirty-five millions — in 
works, business, and adventures on Egyptian soil. There 
are 1353 Europeans who have places and salaries under the 
Khedive. The Bourses of the West have made Cairo and 
Alexandria hunting-grounds for their speculations. Their 
class owns or influences half the Press in Europe. It in- 
fluences, and sometimes makes, half the governments of 
Europe. Here is the true source of all the persistent political 
intrigues of which for years Egypt has been the field. The 
ultimate end of these wealthy persons is a perfectly legiti- 
mate one: it is the increase of their own fortunes. But 
this is not an end which concerns the state. And all the 
lofty reasons of state which they inspire in the Press, and 
impose upon diplomatists, are deeply tainted at their core 
by the fact that the root of them is the desire of rich men 
to become richer. I suspect imposing political schemes 
and imperial interests which rest on an obvious financial 
purpose. 

The oldest and most imposing of the political reasons for 
armed intervention in Egypt is the fear that some other 
Power is likely to occupy it before us. In other words we 
are to seize Egypt in order to forestall France. That is one 
of the shallow traditions of a school of diplomatic quidnuncs. 
It still has its charms for the editors of thoughtful journals. 
Such a policy in itself is neither wise nor honourable; but 
it is needless now to discuss it. There exists at this moment 
not the slightest ground to justify the suspicion that France 
has any such design. Now, indeed, less than ever. The 
evidence of the Blue-books is all the other way. England 
for months has been pushing on France to consent to inter- 
vention. And the argument, if argument it can be called, 
drops to the ground by the force of events. On the contrary, 
the mutual jealousies of France and England in Egypt 



EGYPT 209 

are a very strong reason for not interfering. Whilst it is 
certain that France will make no advance there if we do 
not, it is far from clear that we should not find her ultimately 
waiting to dispute our conquest. An expedition to Egypt 
means in the long run war with France. Is that to be the 
crown of Mr. Gladstone's political life ? * 

Again we hear of international duties, treaties, and settle- 
ments in which " Europe" is interested. But events have 
disposed of this as completely as they have of the supposed 
designs of France. The settlements have settled nothing; 
and "Europe" is at liberty, and is perfectly willing, to make 
any settlement de novo. These settlements and treaties 
were never real settlements in any political sense. They 
were concessions wrung by England and France from two 
Eastern governments, in order to secure for our people 
the utmost possible advantage in their private and financial 
adventures; and in order to place the internal system of 
Egypt at their entire disposal. The scheme has proved 
not workable; it has broken to pieces. Are you, sir, about 
to restore it at the price of a formidable and guilty war for 
the sake of the persons interested? The pretended inter- 
national and European nature of the settlement was always 
a figment. It was a mere financial expedient which has 
brought anarchy into Egypt, ruin on the speculators, and 
infinite anxiety to the governments of Europe. 

Now we hear of the anarchy in Egypt, and the paramount 
duty of suppressing it. Can anything be more certain than 
that the anarchy (such as it is) is the direct work of the allied 
fleets? The fleets at Alexandria made the anarchy. With- 
draw the fleets and it will cease. The "anarchy," as it is 
called, that is, the irritation of certain classes in Egypt with 
the government of the Khedive, has been steadily growing 

1 At Fashoda in 1898 we came within measurable distance of it (1908). 
P 



210 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

for years. It is the obvious consequence of any attempt 
to govern under the pressure of foreign dictation, supported 
by continual menace of foreign intervention. It is easy 
to produce anarchy, riot, and massacre, in any Eastern state 
— or indeed in many Western states. Send the fleets to 
the Bosphorus and deliver an ultimatum to the Sultan; 
you will see a very lively outburst of fanaticism. Or try 
the same at Tangiers, or at Athens, or Zanzibar. You 
can always produce anarchy anywhere by goading a people 
to frenzy where any spark of courage and independence 
is left them. The great aggressive empires always begin 
by producing anarchy in regions which they intend to annex. 
France did this but the other day in Tunis. Anarchy was 
the pretext for invasion in the Transvaal and in Afghanis- 
tan. You, sir, have shown us that the way to restore order 
there was to withdraw the menace. 

As to the lives and property of our countrymen, it is your 
duty to protect them in all things right and reasonable. 
But it is plain why they are in danger; and plain how to 
relieve them. They never were in any risk whatever till 
a long course of foreign dictation culminated in an act of 
armed menace. Their safety will be secured by withdraw- 
ing the fleet, as its presence produced their danger. There 
is no more reason to suppose that (apart from foreign dicta- 
tion) the lives and property of Englishmen will be less safe 
in Egypt than in Turkey or any other part of the East. 
If our countrymen choose to carry their wealth and their 
skill to distant lands, they must do so at their own risk. 
If they behave so as to rouse the hostility of the population, 
that is their fault and they must answer for it. It is a mon- 
strous assumption that this nation is to be responsible for 
all their adventures; and must straightway annex any 
country where their claims to domineer are thwarted or 



EGYPT 211 

disliked. Our adventurous people thrust themselves and 
their business into every country in the globe, civilised 
and uncivilised. The sense that the power of England 
is behind them makes them reck little of forbearance, good 
faith, or conciliation. They assume the rights of conquerors, 
knowing that in the long run they can always force the state 
into conquest. To yield to their claims on the state is to 
increase their confidence and stimulate their demands. 
Such a policy indeed can have but one issue. It would 
lead us to universal dominion, a result too preposterous to 
contemplate. 

We hear much sonorous talk about "civilisation," the 
condition of the fellah, the suppression of the slave-trade, 
and the "Western institutions" which we have planted in 
Egypt. Excellent objects no doubt; but what have these 
to do with eighty-ton guns, a fleet of ironclads, Sepoys, an 
armed occupation, and virtual annexation? These laudable 
purposes would be equally good reasons for annexing Syria, 
or Asia Minor, or indeed any other country in Asia or Africa. 
If these great blessings are to be poured out from our cannon, 
let our missionary fleets and armies tour round the world 
dispensing the gospel of civilisation. To bring them for- 
ward as grounds for a war in Egypt is a shallow and shame- 
less pretext, which no one would ever have heard of, had 
there not been one hundred and fifty millions or so of Western 
gold trembling for its dividends and interest. 

Turn it which way we will, it comes back always to this 
— that we are to go to war really for the money interests 
of certain rich men in London and Paris. It is no doubt 
of great importance to them to get their four and a half 
millions regularly out of the taxes of Egypt. It is a great 
convenience to them to be exempt from taxes, to have virtual 
control of the internal government, to have concessions, 



212 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

business, companies, works, and the rest, to have their own 
courts, their own law, and their own judges, to hold a crowd 
of offices in the Egyptian service, to be a dominant caste 
in a foreign land. All this is very desirable to the persons 
themselves. But it is no concern of this country to guarantee 
them these profits, privileges, and places. It would be 
blood-guilt in this country to enforce these guarantees at 
the cost of war. The interests of these rich and adventurous 
persons are not British interests ; but the interests of certain 
British subjects. And between their interests and war 
and conquest, domination and annexation — how vast is 
the gulf ! Does it necessarily follow that, because certain 
Englishmen hold large sums in Unified bonds, and because 
they have invested much capital in Egyptian works, that 
Europeans are to be guaranteed as a dominant caste; and 
that, if the Egyptian people make any effort to displace one 
rivet of the dominion, there is instant appeal to war, ending 
in virtual conquest ? 

Our people have large interests in the debts of America, 
of Italy, of Turkey, of Greece, of Spain. Much British cap- 
ital is embarked in all of these countries. Is that a ground, 
under any conceivable circumstances, for securing our 
people a local domination, to be followed by conquest if 
this foreign dominion be not patiently borne? Most of 
the conditions present in Egypt exist in a degree in Turkey 
and even in Spain. There too our people are owed enormous 
sums ; there too is a mass of British capital sunk in industrial 
and commercial ventures; there is very often anarchy in 
Turkey as well as in Spain; and there would be anarchy 
again the moment we sent a fleet to produce it. There is 
a great deal of barbarism there, and a fanatical and idle 
population. But the man would be a madman who pre- 
tended that these conditions in Spain or Turkey led us 



EGYPT 213 

logically to enforce the claims of these creditors by war, and 
ultimately to conquer these countries. 

There is, indeed, but one plausible ground after all for 
armed intervention in Egypt, and that is a ground which 
you, sir, have torn to pieces. It is the old windbag cry of 
the Empire in danger. Is it possible that in your lifetime 
and in your ministry, this phantom is again to rear its 
head ! Your whole political life is pledged to the principle 
that "Empire" is no justification of national injustice. 
You have told us that no doctrine can be more criminal 
than this : that a nation has a right to oppress, whenever it 
becomes convenient. What, then, is the syllogism that 
leads us irresistibly from the safety of the Empire to the 
conquest of Egypt? The safety of the Empire seems to 
demand any achievement that can enter into the visions of 
ambitious and restless men. Hot-headed soldiers and 
hare-brained viceroys swore that the Empire was not safe, 
till our ensign floated at Kabul, Candahar, and Herat; as 
they will tell us to-morrow it must float at Baghdad, or 
Pekin. Sir Bartle Frere thought the sun of England was 
set whilst Cetewayo lived and reigned in Zululand. The 
theories of a military expert about the Empire are indeed 
as wild as those of a German philologist, and as anti-social 
as those of a Russian Nihilist. It is the part of a states- 
man to treat these ravings as we treat the barkings of chained 
mastiffs. And of all living statesmen, it is especially your 
part to put them away from the counsels of the state. 

When the windbag pretext of Empire is pricked, the one 
residuum is the Canal. No one denies that the Canal is of 
great importance to his country, on political as well as 
commercial grounds. That importance, as a highway to 
India, has been much exaggerated. But granting its im- 
portance to be real, to what extravagant conclusions is the 



214 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Canal supposed to lead ! Reasonable military and inter- 
national precautions against any interruption of the water- 
way would be approved by public opinion in Europe, as 
much as it would at home. Is there the least reason to 
suppose they would not be accepted in Egypt ? It is a long 
chain of hypotheses indeed which leads from the Canal 
to the conquest of Egypt. The freedom of a watercourse 
less than one hundred miles long through an uninhabited 
desert does duty for the annexation of a country fifty or one 
hundred miles away, larger than France, with a population 
of ten millions, and two of the greatest cities of the East. 

The logical sorites is this. The passage through the 
Canal is of vital interest to England. But the use of it 
implies that England should dominate throughout Egyptian 
territory. Now, this domination implies that Englishmen 
should be free from the local taxes, the jurisdiction, and 
the government. But they cannot be really free without 
they possess the virtual control of the whole internal policy 
of Egypt. Yet, if this control is interfered with, it is the 
duty of the British Government to secure it to them by force. 
Again, if this force is not at once successful, the virtual 
annexation of the country must follow. But the virtual 
annexation of the country means an enormous burden on 
our already overgrown Empire ; and it will almost certainly 
lead to a war with one or more of the Powers of Europe. 
Hence, to be sure of a free passage through the Canal, war 
and conquest in Egypt are a logical necessity. Q. E. D. 
What is this but the old story that the Indian Empire would 
not be safe, unless Christian women could be freely ravished 
on the Danube; and that the occupation of Cyprus would 
shower steam-ploughs throughout the length and breadth 
of Asia Minor? 

We look, sir, to you to distinguish the rational and legiti- 



EGYPT 215 

mate interests of the state from the personal interests of 
private Englishmen, and the fantastic projects of political 
dreamers. The only interest of the nation in Egypt is this, 
that the Canal shall not be closed against us, and that no 
European rival shall found an Empire on the Nile. There 
is at this moment no reasonable ground to fear either of 
these evils. But what measures may be necessary, by 
force of arms or international agreements, to guard against 
either, will not be refused by any party in this country. 
The passage of the Canal could never be guaranteed in 
any absolute sense, even if it were incorporated in the Empire : 
it would still be liable to treacherous destruction or obstruc- 
tion, even if it were in the Punjab or in Ireland. What 
a farce then to tell us that its existence is secured by meddling 
with the promotion of Egyptian officers, by suppressing 
native newspapers at Alexandria, and denying the right of 
a National Chamber to add £300,000 to the Budget ! To 
pretend that the freedom of the Canal requires the recon- 
stitution of the status quo by armed intervention is like 
saying, as our grandfathers said, that commerce w T ould not 
be free in the English Channel till we had suppressed the 
Republic in France. In other words, and you, sir, will 
not deny the position : the Canal is not worth the evils of 
conquering Egypt, even if conquest were the sole means of 
securing it. M. Lesseps tells us, as common sense told us 
before, that the real danger to the Canal lies in the dread 
of an English invasion and conquest. 

The settlement of Egypt on some tolerable basis that 
may promise stability and order is no doubt a British inter- 
est of a very real kind. And the nation will welcome any 
solution that the counsels of Europe can devise — without 
war and without oppression. But two things are certain: 
the Control and the status quo have utterly failed, and any 



2l6 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

settlement to be forced on the Egyptian people by war and 
invasion is doomed to failure as well. The status quo has 
done some good; but it had the incurable vice of being the 
domination of an alien caste, directed to secure their per- 
sonal interests, resting on intrigue and menace, but not on 
acceptance and not on force. The ascendancy of a foreign 
race, even where they have much to offer to the natives, 
and even where the natives are so far behind them in wealth 
and knowledge, cannot be permanently secured without con- 
quest ; and it must be maintained by a protracted struggle 
for supremacy. If that ascendancy is to be secured under 
new forms and after a bloody contest, it will be the occasion 
of a series of rebellions and wars. We repudiate, as equally 
wild and criminal, the burdening this country with a British 
Algeria on the banks of the Nile. 1 

It was not for an English ministry wantonly to destroy 
the Control and the so-called settlement of Egypt, so long 
as it seemed to be working, and apart from a general 
revolution. But the Control and the settlement altogether 
being swept away in the crash, it is a duty to review the 
situation afresh and to seek some new solution. No diplo- 
matic grandiloquence, no international treaties, no firmans 
or decrees, can obscure the fact — that the effect of the 
settlement was to make the Khedive the manifest tool of 
his foreign patrons, to secure to foreign Powers the practical 
administration of the country, to maintain the sixty thousand 
Europeans in Egypt in the privileges of a dominant caste, 
to place the offices of the country mainly in their hands, 
to offer unlimited opportunities for Western enterprise, to 
revolutionise the life of the country in the interest of Western 
capitalists, and finally and mainly, to secure the punctual 

1 Therein lies the present, continuous, and indestructible "unrest" in 
Egypt, which will one day become an intolerable evil (1908). 



EGYPT 217 

payment for ever to Western creditors of about one-half 
of the entire revenue of the nation. 

To saddle the fellahs of the Nile for all time with a debt 
of more than one hundred millions, more than the debt of 
Prussia, is an international crime which no treaties can 
gloze over and no imperial interests can excuse. To carry 
off year by year half the revenue of a poor country to pay 
to foreigners for their usurious and fraudulent loans, forced 
on a half -lunatic despot, is a mere financial juggle; and 
nothing can make its maintenance worthy of a just nation, 
though its settlement was effected by right honourables, 
ambassadors, and European treaties. One need not deny 
that some temporary relief has been given to the native; 
or that the money of Europe has afforded some material 
improvements. But the reduction of a population of ten 
millions to a systematic debt-slavery, enforced from time 
to time by war, is dearly bought by the partial introduction 
of Western law, railways, and gas-works. And "civilisa- 
tion," as it is understood by syndicates of bankers and 
concessionaires, is not worth the bloody and fraudulent 
crushing down of an Eastern people under the insolent 
dominion of a motley tribe, alien in race, religion, and 
habit. 

Sir, a great occasion is now yours: to find some tolera- 
ble settlement of the Egyptian imbroglio, without war and 
without international oppression. The talk we hear about 
imperial interests and British rights is a flimsy varnish, as 
we see, to cover the lust of conquest and the thirst for gold. 
It is idle to discuss whether Arabi Pachi represents a national 
or a military movement. It is certain that the domination 
of Egypt cannot be secured to England without a desul- 
tory war with the natives first, and a possible war with Eu- 
rope afterwards. The permanent exploitation of Egypt by 



2l8 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Western speculators and adventurers is an object which it 
is worthy of your career formally to repudiate as a national 
concern. It will avail your good name hereafter but little, 
that you raised your voice against the persecution of the 
Christians in Turkey, if one of the last acts of your official 
life shall have been to rivet on one province of that Empire 
a debt-slavery to their Christian masters. There is one 
consideration I omit; for it would be an insult to you and 
your colleagues. I will not conceive it possible that you 
can be about to commit this people entrusted to your care 
to the crime and risk of a new conquest, simply because 
the official policy of the past has led to a disaster which you 
and they from the first foresaw. 
July i, 1882. 



IX 

THE BOER WAR 

(December 1899) 

The Boer War raised so many of the questions treated in 
previous sections, and illustrated so clearly the evils of 
vicious policy abroad, that it is impossible altogether to 
omit notice of it. Nor can it be charged that my friends 
or myself failed to assert the same principles for which 
we had contended for a whole generation. We formed 
associations, held meetings, published addresses and 
pamphlets, and for four years sought to bring our fellow- 
citizens to reasonable views. I now issue a few extracts 
from various speeches and writings of my own during 
that dismal period. 

It is a satisfaction to know that the chaos and desolation 
caused in South Africa by that cruel folly are being 
slowly cured, and that an era of peace and progress may 
be looked for on lines so different from those anticipated 
by the misguided authors of the War. As I write, the 
three chief states in South Africa are being directed by 
men who in arms or in council were the most eminent 
leaders of the Boer defence. And their wise and generous 
efforts promise a settlement harmonious and prosper- 
ous — now that our country has wasted £250,000,000 
and 20,000 lives — in the vain attempt to conquer and 
enthral a free people (igo8). 
219 



220 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

The foundation of Rhodesia and the militant phase of 
the Chartered Company caused deep alarm in the Transvaal 
and its neighbour. The two Boer Republics which had 
trekked forth, fought, and suffered in order to be free of 
British dominion, now found themselves engulfed by the 
Empire — North, South, East, and West — finally shut 
out from the Northern wilderness, and girt on North and 
West by British powers, all controlled by the great " Empire- 
builder," who openly aimed at bringing South Africa, from 
the Zambesi to the Cape, under the Union Jack. If from 
that hour the Boers did not strain every nerve to prepare 
to defend their freedom, they would have deserved to lose 
it without a blow. 

But the Transvaal soon found its independence menaced 
by a new force. In 1886, it was discovered that most valu- 
able gold-fields existed in the Transvaal, and miners and 
gold agencies poured in. Wealth, far more vast than that 
of the diamond fields, as spread over a larger area, a far 
larger outland population, greater fortunes and bigger com- 
panies arose. In eleven years Johannesburg became, not 
only the wealthiest, the most modern, but the largest town 
in South Africa. The annual output of gold rose to about 
twelve millions. The expenditure of the state rose from 
£114,000 to between four and five millions. The Out- 
lander male population began to exceed that of burghers. 
The old President believed that the Outlanders were about 
to swamp the Boers. As they pressed for political power 
the Transvaal narrowed its terms, until at last an immense 
body of aliens — a majority, far the wealthiest and most 
cultivated — found itself in the grasp of a jealous, obstinate, 
unfriendly, unyielding government, which regarded them 
as in a state of permanent conspiracy to displace it. And 
this, no doubt, was quite true. 



THE BOER WAR 221 

This is not the place or time to rehearse the trite story 
of Outlander grievances and Boer misrule. I have come 
here to state historic facts, not to plead the Boer case or to 
excuse or justify Boer policy. I am quite willing to believe 
that much of it was unjust as well as unwise. I do not 
doubt that the railway and mining and dynamite monopo- 
lies were oppressive, that their Protective tariff almost 
outdid that of President M'Kmley; that the education of 
English children was neglected, as indeed it is in France; 
that the municipal government of the Rand was as bad 
as it is in Spain; that the Chamber was open to bribes, 
as it is said to be in the United States. All this and more 
may be true, but, as Mr. Bryce justly insists, it gave no 
legitimate ground for war. 

And on the top of this race antipathy, of these bitter 
memories, of these incessant menaces, of these well-grounded 
fears, came the Raid; organised by the Prime Minister 
of a great British colony, carried out by the armed forces 
raised under Royal Charter, and led by men of rank in the 
Queen's service. Of this Raid, wherein, as Mr. Lecky 
says, a Privy Councillor and servant of the Crown organised 
a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of a friendly 
state, deceiving the High Commissioner, his own colleagues 
in the Ministry, and the great companies for which he was 
the principal trustee, I will not here speak. The Colonial 
Secretary told Parliament that all this was "a mistake," 
but that the author of it "had done nothing dishonourable." 
Mr. Rhodes admitted that he had upset the apple-cart; 
and gracefully retired from the scene uncondemned. 

He ceased to be Prime Minister, but he continued to build 
Empire, to menace the independence of the Boers, to labour 
for colouring South Africa pink in spite of Boer, in spite 
of a parliamentary majority in Cape Colony, at the cost 



222 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

of our good name and welfare in the United Kingdom. 
Mr. Cecil Rhodes is, after all, only one, no doubt the greatest, 
but the type of groups of keen, ambitious, reckless men 
who have forced us into war — a war wherein the whole 
Empire is now being strained to its roots in order to crush 
some 50,000 herdsmen, whose ancestors for a whole century 
have struggled to be free from British grip. If I felt free 
to speak my whole mind, I should speak of it as a new 
Imperial Raid, carried out in the name of our Queen, under 
the instigation of a combination of trading syndicates. It 
would take us too far to consider the justice or morality of 
these raids, whether Chartered or Imperial, and we might 
be told that all this was "unctuous rectitude." Rectitude 
of any kind, it seems, has gone out of fashion. But I am 
old-fashioned enough to prefer it to unctuous turpitude. 
And I prefer the name of a just, peaceful, and righteous 
England to that of an Empire scrambling for half a con- 
tinent at the bidding and in the interest of cosmopolitan 
gamblers and speculative companies, in search of bigger 
dividends and higher premiums. 



X 

THE STATE OF SIEGE 

(1901) 

The lawless proceedings of civil and military authorities in 
South Africa, in colonies in which neither war nor 
rebellion existed, called out strong protests from lawyers 
and politicians. But the incredible defiance of law and 
precedent by the Government at home and the House of 
Lords raised the indignation to a point which I sought to 
express in the following statement. 

The course then followed by Ministers and the Court 
of Appeal shook to its foundations the system of Consti- 
tutional law as understood in England for two centuries 
and a half. I am prepared to substantiate every proposi- 
tion of law here laid down, and I challenge any competent 
lawyer to displace them, writing with his own name, 
citing precedents of authority (1908). 

"The State of Siege," as understood in some foreign 
countries, and as it is embodied in the constitution of France, 
is a thing unknown to the British constitution and abhorrent 
to the principles and traditions of English law. If the 
Empire has come to that pass that its welfare demands 
our submitting to such an anomaly, a change so tremendous 
should be expressly adopted by the nation and sanctioned 
by Parliament. To foist it upon us out of a few vague 
legal dicta, and the loose assertions of Ministers and journal- 

223 



224 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

ists, would be treason to the noble history of English justice 
and English faith in law and freedom. 

The question at stake to-day — whether or not the Ex- 
ecutive of this country can at will impose "the State of 
Siege" without control of civil courts, and without being 
responsible to law ? — is a far bigger and more critical 
matter than any incidental breach of a particular law. It 
is not even the abrogation of a constitutional privilege, 
however important. It is the collapse of the whole edifice 
of constitutional law as understood since the Revolution 
which swept away the Stuarts. If, at any moment, the 
Executive, without the assent or knowledge of parliament, 
can declare itself despotic, and can suspend and defy the 
entire body of civil law, and never be liable to give any 
account in a civil court of justice — then we have gone back 
two or three centuries to the times of Stuart and Tudor 
absolutism, and even worse; for the whole fabric of the 
constitution, built up by a long succession of parliamentary 
and judicial acts, is shaken down to its roots. 

The levity and the apathy with which this formidable 
change in the position of every citizen has been ignored 
can only be explained by general ignorance of law and the 
passions roused by the war. There is too much readiness 
to give any licence to those who are fighting the Boers, and 
to approve any weapon that can be used against them and 
their Afrikander kindred. But this is suicidal folly. In 
flinging overboard in a time of pressure the central principles 
of British law, we are sacrificing the best achievements of 
our own ancestors and preparing a novel bondage for our 
own descendants. 

Our civil rights are matters of general principle, which 
may be insidiously undermined by casual precedents. Eng- 
lish law is of that kind that, if you play fast and loose with 



THE STATE OF SIEGE 225 

it, it vanishes. Defy the principles of liberty under the 
law, and there will soon be no principles remaining at all. 
There is but one constitutional law for all subjects of the 
Crown, where not specially modified by local charter or Act 
of Parliament. Every citizen within the Empire, of what- 
ever race, is imperilled by the breach of constitutional right 
in any part of it. What is done in a colony to-day may 
be done in Ireland to-morrow, and in England hereafter. 
If the government of the Cape may "declare the State of 
Siege," assume the powers of Czar and Sultan, and defy 
any court of law at home or abroad to question it, it may 
be the turn of Canada or Australia next — presently of 
Ireland — and a future Joseph Chamberlain may have 
another Morley or Harcourt condemned and executed at 
Aldershot by a captain of horse and two lieutenants of 
yeomanry. 

"Martial Law," unless it means "military law," — a for- 
mal code of rules dealing only with the army and navy, and 
never applicable to civilians at all — or unless it means 
"warlike operations" and "military violence," is a mere 
nickname or slang. The idea that the "proclamation of 
Martial Law" is equivalent to the "declaration of the State 
of Siege" under the code of the French Republic, that it 
gives any legal authority to the civil and military servants 
of the Crown to exercise arbitrary acts of punishment and 
restraint of civilians, such as they do not possess under the 
law — all this is a vulgar error. Martial Law gives no fresh 
legal right. It is merely notice that the armed forces of the 
Crown are about to take those measures as to persons and 
property within defined limits which are directly necessary 
to repel invasion and to suppress open rebellion. To pretend 
that this mere "proclamation" confers a legal immunity on 
the Crown and its agents to suspend law, to abrogate civil 
Q 



226 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

rights, to assume despotic authority in general administra- 
tion of the country — is a wild sophism. To admit such a 
right would land us in such a state of society as when the 
state was seized by some Italian Podesta" or some old Greek 
"tyrant." 

The rights and duties of the servants of the Crown, when 
order is so far disturbed by invasion, riot, or civil war, that 
soldiers have to act in a military way, are perfectly clear and 
reasonable. It is their duty to meet force by force, to kill, 
seize, arrest, and hold all who oppose them, and all who 
interfere with their own operations of war. Their acts of 
violence are justifiable whilst they concern direct operations 
of war, military offences, open resistance or interference with 
any act of war. Such acts to be justifiable must be both 
temporary and local ; limited in time to a period when inva- 
sion, rebellion, or disorder openly exist, and limited in space 
to the places where such disorder and war actually are found. 
When invasion and rebellion are crushed, and in places where 
they do not exist, the pretended "Martial Law" gives no 
servant of the Crown, civil or military, any legal right to do 
anything he could not do under the ordinary law, no right 
to administer any district arbitrarily, no right to inflict any 
punishment on a civilian. Every man, from Commander- 
in-Chief down to a private, from Viceroy down to a police- 
man, remains liable to be tried by a jury for any act done 
outside law during war or rebellion, and he is criminally 
liable to punishment for any illegal act committed when war 
or rebellion have ceased to exist, and in places where they 
have been suppressed. This being so, many scores of judi- 
cial murders have been committed by soldiers in South 
Africa, and hundreds of sentences passed on civilians are 
not only invalid in law, but expose those pretending to 
exercise them to criminal process. 



THE STATE OF SIEGE 227 

This is the certain law of England, laid down for centuries 
by great lawyers, and established by a series of statutes and 
judgments. It has of late years been repeated by such 
authorities as Chief Justice Cockburn, Lord Blackburn, 
Mr. Justice Stephen, Professor Dicey, and almost every jurist 
who has treated constitutional law. Professor Dicey was 
merely repeating accepted maxims when he said in his Law 
of the Constitution, 3rd edition, 1889, p. 265: — 

"Martial Law" in the proper sense of the term, in which it means 
the suspension of ordinary law and the temporary government of 
a country or parts of it by military tribunals, is unknown to the law 
of England. We have nothing equivalent to what in France is called 
the "Declaration of the State of Siege," under which the authority 
ordinarily vested in the Civil power for the maintenance of order and 
power passes entirely to the army. 

"It is also clear that a soldier, as such, has no exemption from liability 
to the law for his conduct in restoring order." 

"This kind of martial law [state of siege as understood in France] 
is in England utterly unknown to the Constitution. Soldiers may 
suppress a riot as they may resist an invasion, they may fight rebels 
just as they may fight foreign enemies, but they have no right under 
the law to inflict punishment for riot or rebellion . . . any execution 
(independently of military law) inflicted by a Court Martial is illegal, 
and technically murder." 

To the same effect writes Mr. Justice Stephen in his 
History of the Criminal Law, vol. i., pp. 207-216. He, like 
every lawyer, agrees that the officers of the Crown are jus- 
tified in any exertion of physical force to suppress insurrec- 
tion and restore order ; but they remain civilly or criminally 
liable for any excess, and are not justified in inflicting pun- 
ishment after resistance is suppressed, and after the ordinary 
courts of justice can be reopened. 

This view was affirmed by the Lord Chief Justice Cock- 
burn in his charge to the Grand Jury in Reg. v. Nelson and 
Brand (1867). He shows that the common law is the in- 
heritance of all subjects of the realm ; that in settled colonies 



228 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

with responsible government, the constitutional rights and 
statutes of Englishmen obtain. He quotes Lord Chief 
Justice Hale that civilians could never be tried by martial 
law. He quotes Coke "that a rebel may be slain in the 
rebellion ; but, if he be taken, he cannot be put to death by 
the martial law." And he quotes Lord Chief Justice Rolle, 
who said: — "If a subject be taken in rebellion, and be not 
slain at the time of his rebellion, he is to be tried by the com- 
mon law." Lord Loughborough, afterwards Lord Chan- 
cellor, said {Grant v. Gould, 1792) : — 

Martial law, such as it is described by Hale, and such as it is marked 
by Mr. Justice Blackstone, does not exist in England at all. Where 
martial law is established and prevails in any country, it is of a totally 
different nature from that which is inaccurately called martial law, 
merely because the decision is by court martial, but which bears no 
affinity to that which was formerly attempted to be exercised in this 
Kingdom ; which was contrary to the Constitution, and which has been 
for a century totally exploded. 

It was thought that Lord Blackburn did not entirely adopt 
the language of Chief Justice Cockburn. What difference 
of opinion there was turned on minor points. On the main 
question, he said {Reg. v. Eyre, 1868) : — 

Even if an officer's illegal act was the salvation of the country, that, 
though it might be a good ground for the legislature afterwards passing 
an Act of Indemnity, would be no bar in law to a criminal prosecution. 
. . . The mere fact of good intention, or even the benefit that may 
have been done, would not be a bar to a criminal indictment. 

He held that in a settled colony the settlers carry the law 
of England with them. He held that the Petition of Right 
which prohibited resort to Martial Law in time of peace did 
not sanction it specifically, even in time of war. He held 
that the Governor who kept up Martial Law for thirty days 
after the end of an insurrection did wrong. And in arresting 
and sending a prisoner out of a district where civil law was 



THE STATE OF SIEGE 229 

in force into a district under the rule of soldiers, the gov- 
ernor " committed a grave and lawless act of tyranny and 
oppression." 

Now, all these things, for ages declared illegal, have been 
done in South Africa. The rule of the sword has been main- 
tained, not for days, but for years, in districts where no 
fighting exists, where the civil courts are open. Civilians 
have been seized, imprisoned, sentenced by soldiers without 
warrant. They have been carried off into districts where 
civil law is not acting. British subjects have been tried, 
condemned, and executed for treason and rebellion, by 
troops without any pretence of military codes; and this is 
murder. Coke said, " If a lieutenant execute any man by 
colour of ' martial law ' this is murder, for it is against Magna 
Charta." In the rebellion in Canada, in 1838, Lord Camp- 
bell and Lord Cranworth, then Attorney and Solicitor-Gen- 
eral, advised the Government that when the regular courts 
were open, there is no power in the Crown to proceed by 
military courts. A long succession of legal authorities, down 
from the Civil Wars, have established these principles : — 

1. "Martial law," as meaning the continuous govern- 
ment of any district within British dominions by military 
persons or tribunals, is unknown to our law. 

2. It is the duty of all in the service of the Crown to repel 
invasion, crush rebellion and treason by arms, and to execute 
all necessary operations of war. Rebels may be killed in fight, 
and all who are assisting rebels or invaders may be arrested. 

3. It is illegal for soldiers to try or punish civilians for 
offences triable by civil courts when civil courts are open. 

4. Every official remains liable to trial for every breach of 
law against the person or property of a civilian subject, even 
if taken in arms, and a fortiori of one who has taken no part 
in the war. 



230 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

5. Such an official has a good defence, if his act can be 
proved to be a direct incident of actual war; but of this a 
civil magistrate and jury are the judges. 

6. Nothing but an Act of the Legislature can withdraw 
from a civil court the cognisance of offences committed by 
soldiers against civilian subjects of the Crown. 

These principles have been flagrantly defied in South 
Africa ever since 1900; though since 1689 there has been no 
attempt to set up martial law as a system in England, even 
during the Jacobite rebellions and Scotch invasions; nor 
could any lawyer have doubted that to set up martial law, 
so as to suspend all civil rights without authority of Parlia- 
ment, was illegal and criminal. Suddenly, by a bolt out of 
the blue, the Privy Council, under the lead of the Lord Chan- 
cellor, himself one of the Ministers charged with illegal 
action, assumed the power to tear up these settled maxims of 
the constitution. He induced the Court to refuse full trial 
of the petition of a civilian, who, without due proof of any 
act of assisting rebels, had been seized in a district where 
order had not been disturbed, where law courts were regu- 
larly sitting, and who has been kept in a military prison 
untried for seven months. 

The obiter dicta of the Lord Chancellor at the hearing were 
a surprise to the Bar, recalling a Chancellor in comic opera 
not the "keeper of the King's conscience." He cited the 
trial by Military Court of a naval officer, as if that applied 
to the case of a civilian. He " protested" against a dictum 
of Lord Coke. He professed to think little of Chief Justice 
Cockburn, and set small store by the case of Wolfe Tone, in 
Ireland in 1798, on which all the judges and all the text- 
books have uniformly insisted as a decisive and leading case. 
He tried to distinguish the case of "foreign invasion" from 
that of "rebellion" and "civil war." There is no authority 



THE STATE OF SIEGE 23 1 

whatever for this distinction so far as "the State of Siege" 
or "martial law" is concerned. On the contrary, the case 
of Wolfe Tone was itself a striking instance of war and foreign 
invasion and rebellion together. War was indeed "raging" 
in Ireland in 1798-9. Finally, the bald and weak judgment, 
as after six weeks' incubation it was delivered in writing, 
takes no note of the mass of decisions and authorities which 
it defies, but professes to rest this vast revolution in the civil 
status of all British subjects on an obscure appeal from an 
Indian court in 181 7, a case which turned on the conquest of 
a foreign realm, during a state of war, and on the claim to 
money of a subject of an Eastern despot — a case which no 
more concerned the constitutional right to liberty of a civil- 
ian British citizen in a time of peace than do the proceedings 
in Rex v. Bishop Gore. 

The case of Elphinstone v. Bedreechund (I. Knapp, 316) 
was the case on which the Lord Chancellor relied for revers- 
ing Coke, Hale, Blackstone, Campbell, Cranworth, Cock- 
burn, Blackburn, and a host of text-writers and com- 
mentators. The case does not seem to have been even 
mentioned in argument, and, indeed, " it has nothing to do with 
the case," as the Lord High Executioner puts it in the Mikado. 
In nine bare lines the judgment in that Indian case decides 
that what soldiers take as prizes of war from a foreign enemy, 
during war in an enemy's country, cannot be recovered by an 
agent of the foreign despot in a civil action during the con- 
tinuance of the war. What has this to do with the right of 
a civilian British subject, in a district where peace reigns and 
civil courts are at work, to be free from arrest and imprison- 
ment by soldiers without warrant or authority by statute ? 

There seems to be a strange confusion of thought in those 
who now argue about salus reipublicae suprema lex — "the 
prerogative of the Crown to assert peace and order" — or 



232 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the necessity for illegal action "whilst war is raging/' It is, 
no doubt, the duty of the Crown and its servants to take all 
or any measures necessary to preserve the existence of the 
state. This necessity would justify them if charged with 
unlawful action. But it does not make their unlawful 
action legal. Nor does it withdraw that action (what- 
ever it may have been) from the purview of a civil court 
hereafter. The Government have occasionally in a panic 
authorised a breach of the Bank Act. But such breach 
was not a legal act, nor was it withdrawn, before any 
indemnity statute was passed, from review in a court of law. 
It was a thing outside law, without sanction of law, advisedly 
committed at peril, though excusable on adequate justifica- 
tion when challenged in law. The captain of a ship might 
put in irons or kill any of his officers or crew whom he sus- 
pected of plotting mutiny. He might run his ship ashore 
and blow it up to prevent its falling into an enemy's hands. 
But it is no part of the articles of war for a captain to kill his 
own men, or to destroy his own ship. These acts are not 
legal, nor can necessity make them legal, nor withdraw them 
from cognisance of a proper tribunal. They remain utterly 
illegal, but excusable on adequate proof of necessity. The 
acts of Government in breach of law may be morally and 
politically right, and legally excusable. But they always re- 
main lawless, utterly unprovided for in law, and always 
open to consideration by courts of law. If not, it is always 
open to a Government to declare itself despotic — as Louis 
Napoleon did, or as a Spanish dictator in America does. 

The gravity of the present occasion consists in this — 
that for the first time in the history of our country since the 
Great Charter the violent assumption of arbitrary power has 
been declared by a court of law to be legal — or at least not 
open to question by any court of law — those who seize the 



THE STATE OF SIEGE 233 

arbitrary power being declared to be the sole judges of the 
rights they exercise. If so, it is open to Lord Roberts to 
make a pronunciamento in front of the Horse Guards and 
declare this country to be a military empire in "a State of 
Siege." The Lord Chancellor, if sitting in court, would 
have to hold: "Lord Roberts declares that 'war is raging' ; 
and we lawyers have nothing more to say." Nothing that 
was done by Strafford or Cromwell, by Laud or Jeffreys, 
went as far as this. The public takes it quietly, because it 
is done to Afrikanders at the Cape, and they trust it may help 
Kitchener to end the war. All this is a delusion. It is done 
to English subjects, and cuts into the roots of our constitu- 
tion. It is a menace to the peace of our own country. 

This question is indeed the most vital and sweeping in the 
whole range of public law, for it concerns the very existence 
of law itself, not of any particular right. It is the question 
whether England is a country of constitutional law, or a 
country in which the Executive of the hour can outlaw the 
nation, and place itself above law. If this new claim of out- 
landish autocracy is admitted — 

'Twill be recorded for a precedent, 

And many an error by the same example 

Will rush into the state. 

There is but one public law, where not specially modified, 
for all the Britons. All Britons enjoy the same constitu- 
tional right which is one and indivisible. And the founda- 
tions of this right disappear if, when it is necessary anywhere 
to appeal to the sword, the only rule is to be — inter anna 
silent leges — nay, too, silet jus — silent jurisconsulti. No 
lawyer doubts that in extreme peril and confusion the ser- 
vants of the Crown are bound to take all measures to save 
the state and protect their sovereign. But to tell us that 



234 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

soldiers are to be trie sole judges of the necessity, of the con- 
ditions and limits of their powers, are never to be account- 
able to any civil tribunal, are to be what the King is, i.e. 
"can do no wrong," and are judge, jury, counsel, and wit- 
nesses in their own case ; this is enough to make Coke, Hale, 
Blackstone, and Mansfield turn in their graves. 

During the Gordon riots Lord Chancellor Thurlow said : — 

But the King, any more than a private person, could not supersede 
the law, nor act contrary to it, and, therefore, he was bound to take 
care that the means he used for putting an end to the rebellion and 
insurrection were legal and constitutional, and the military employed 
for that purpose were every one of them amenable to the law, because 
no word of command from their particular officer, no direction from 
the War Office, or Order of Council could warrant or sanction their 
acting illegally ... all persons of all descriptions being equally ame- 
nable to the laws of the land, and answerable to them for their conduct 
on every occasion. 

In his judgment in the leading case of Fdbrigas v. Mostyn, 
Lord Mansfield thus laid down the law as to the liability of 
a colonial governor : — 

To lay down in an English court of justice such monstrous propo- 
sitions as that a governor acting by virtue of letters patent under 
the great seal can do as he pleases; that he is accountable only to God 
and his own conscience — and to maintain here that every governor 
in every place can act absolutely; that he may spoil, plunder, affect 
their bodies and their liberty, and is accountable to nobody — is a 
doctrine not to be maintained; for, if he be not accountable in this 
court, he is accountable nowhere. 

Now, if the "State of Siege" is an exotic of despotism, un- 
known to English law, the "proclamation of Martial Law" 
gives no new rights to governor or commander; but both 
soldier and civilian remain accountable for their acts in civil 
courts — wherever such are in regular sessions. 

No one denies, be it said again, that the extra-legal acts 
of violence, taken in an emergency and the storm of war, 
may prove to be justifiable by circumstances and even 
striking instances of patriotic duty. But nothing can make 



THE STATE OF SIEGE 



235 



them legal in themselves, nor make the authors of such illegal 
acts the sole judges of the necessity, and for ever unaccount- 
able to justice. The sinister evil of to-day is, not so much 
that lawless acts of violence are being done, not that so many 
public speakers and writers approve of their being done. It 
is that the Government of the King, the Supreme Court of 
Appeal, and the first law officer of the realm, dare to tell us 
that law has nothing to do with the matter at all. 

Hitherto, it has been regarded as undoubted law that 
neither the Crown nor its officials can lawfully "suspend" 
law, or "dispense with" laws; that where they violate law 
under an alleged "necessity," they remain liable to justify 
a bond fide necessity when summoned before a civil court. 
Prerogative, official immunity, superior order, "reasons of 
state," "martial law," are in this behalf mere fictions and 
figures of speech, unknown to English law. The final ex- 
pulsion of the Stuart dynasty turned on this very claim "to 
suspend law," to "dispense with" laws. And the Bill of 
Rights was the answer of the nation, which in its first two 
sections expressly declares the pretended power of suspend- 
ing law or dispensing with laws to be illegal. Now the Bill 
of Rights and its extending statute the Act of Settlement are 
the constitutional laws which deposed the Stuarts and are 
the sole title to the throne of the House of Hanover. So 
that the constitutional party have made our gracious sov- 
ereign begin his reign by exercising the despotic power which 
cost James his crown, and which is forbidden by the very 
statute to which King Edward VII. owes his own throne. 

It was a strange confusion of mind that caused the Prime 
Minister to say that if Martial Law was not a lawful system 
it ought to be so made. Well, there is a very simple mode 
of making it lawful, which is to carry a Bill through Parlia- 
ment and turn the British constitution upside down. He 



236 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

might just as well say — "If the Crown has no power to 
tax without consent, it ought to be given that power, and in 
the meantime we will take it." Or he might say — "If con- 
scription is not legal, let us act as if it were, for it ought to 
be legal." This is just what Strafford and Laud, Jeffreys 
and James II. , tried to do. They all said — if the constitu- 
tion does not give power enough to the royal prerogative, 
the King must take it — "for the good of his people." And 
so, the Prime Minister and his Chancellor in effect say — 
"The King's troops have seized civilians in a district where 
order has not been disturbed, keep them in a military prison, 
uncharged and untried; but to talk about Habeas Corpus 
and civil courts is mere 'legal pedantry,' for the proclama- 
tion of Martial Law by His Majesty's officers has now 'sus- 
pended' law and 'dispensed with' the constitution and the 
rights of the subject !" 

It is strange to find the twentieth century thus returning 
on the seventeenth. It is stranger to see the constitutional 
party opening a new revolution and providing future weap- 
ons for terrorists. Danton and Robespierre insisted that 
foreign invasion and treason at home were sufficient author- 
ity for the party in possession of power to kill those who 
opposed them, with or without legal pedantry. The major- 
ity may turn even here. Those who hold the electorate for 
the time being fancy themselves exempt from the risks which 
were run by a Stuart king. But the electorate is fickle. 
Conscription — taxing food — suppressing trade unions — 
if pressed home, as some imperialists talk of pressing them, 
might lead to disorder even here; might end in a civil war 
and surprising changes in the temper of the people. Why 
might not a democratic or a socialist majority " suspend law," 
and laugh at the outcries of the constitutional party, if they 
ventured to appeal in their own behalf to "legal pedantry"? 



XI 

EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 

{January i, 1880) 

The following was a portion oftlie Annual Address given to the 
Positivist Society at Newton Hall on January 1, 1880. 
This was towards the end of the Ministry of Lord Bea- 
consfield, and about the epoch of Mr. Gladstone's famous 
Mid-Lothian campaign. It was published in the Fort- 
nightly Review, February 1880 (vol. xxi'ii.). 

Though it is now twenty-eight years old, it is reissued 
because in all its essential principles it is now as true as it 
was then, and because succeeding events have proved how 
real were the dangers which it deprecated, and how con- 
tinually the same evils are bred by the imperialist system. 
It may serve to explain tJte general view of tlie political 
world on which the preceding essays and protests were 
based, and also to show that this political scheme of 
international justice and morality is the direct result of 
the religious faith expounded in preceding volumes (iqo8). 

Europe is still in arms: each nation watching every other 
with suspicion, jealousy, or menace. The West still groans 
under that policy of aggrandisement, of imperial ambition 
and military concentration, which was so fatally renewed 
by the house of Napoleon; which has been developed into 
a system by the houses of Hohenzollern and Romanoff. The 
crime of December '51 led on by a sure course to the empire 

237 



238 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

of the Corsicans,' to military government, to foreign wars, 
till it awoke by a fatal reaction the military revival of Ger- 
many, and ended in the foundation of a new empire of the 
sword. That empire was the prize won in three successive 
wars, each one carefully prepared and deliberately contrived, 
and each followed by violent annexation of territory. The 
camp at Berlin still arms, still studies new wars, still menaces 
its neighbours. Worst of all, it fills the air with its spirit, 
and the sense of foreboding. It fiercely and cynically pro- 
claims that its conquests must naturally lead to a fresh 
appeal to the sword; and, for its own part, it hardly cares 
how soon the appeal be made. Berlin almost taunts Paris 
with waiting so long for her revenge. To the east of Eu- 
rope, the three Empires watch each other's movements with 
alternations of suspicion, menace, and intrigue. Russia 
seizes the opportunity to recommence her old career of con- 
quest and aggrandisement. Italy too has been infected with 
the same frenzy ; and vapours about winning more provinces 
in arms. And as Lord Palmerston gave us in a policy of 
self-assertion and of menace a weak imitation of Napoleon's 
empire, so now our Lord Beaconsfield would catch some rays 
from the imperial crown of Germany, and parades (against 
the weak and the uncivilised) a policy of Empire and of War. 

For more than a generation Europe has endured the mis- 
ery of this new imperial ambition. Within that time four 
new titles of Emperor or Empress have been assumed by 
European royal families — of which titles two still survive. 
Within that period six great wars in Europe have been waged, 
every one of them followed by territorial changes and forcible 
annexation. 

And what is the result? Russia overwhelmed with a 
military cancer, a prey to a social confusion such as has not 
been seen in this century. Germany, with her intelligence 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 



239 



and her industry bound in the fetters of military service, gov- 
erned as if she were a camp, as if the sole object of peace 
were to prepare for war. France staggering under the most 
tremendous defeats that this century has witnessed, and still 
not clear of the long agony of her domestic revolution. Italy 
weighted with a useless army, uneasy, intriguing, restless. 
Spain still weak from the drain of a series of wars and internal 
convulsions. England uncertain, divided in action, con- 
tinually distracted and dishonoured by an endless succession 
of miserable wars in every quarter of the globe. 1 

Such is a picture of Europe after a generation of im- 
perialism and of aggressive war. Who is the gainer? Is 
the poor Russian moujik, torn from his home to die in Cen- 
tral Asia or on the passes of the Balkans, doomed to a gov- 
ernment of ever deepening corruption and tyranny? Is the 
workman of Berlin the better, crushed by military oppres- 
sion, and industrial recklessness ? Who is the gainer — the 
rulers or the ruled? Is the French peasant the gainer now 
that Alsace and Lorraine are gone, and nothing rests of the 
empire but its debt, its conspirators, and its legacy of confu- 
sion ? Or is the wretched Czar the gainer, hunted like a mad 
dog? Or the imperial family of Germany, so ominously 
bound up with the future of the Czar? Or our own Em- 
press and Queen in whose name patriots and priests are being 
hung in Kabul ? Who is the gainer by this career of blood- 
shed and ambition ? It would be a gloomy outlook for those 
who believe in Humanity, in Progress, in a Future of Peace, 
were it not that we know this to be the last throes of the 
monarchical and military system. And we hear the groans 
of the millions — the working, suffering millions — who are 

1 This was spoken in January 1880, at the close of Lord Beaconsfield's 
ministry; and in the twenty-eight years since somewhat similar conditions 
prevailed (January 1900). 



240 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

yearning to replace this cruel system, none of their making, 
none of their choice, by which they gain nothing, from which 
they hope nothing. 

For more than a generation our party has called out that 
there can be no safety for the West until the grand object of 
our rulers becomes the peaceful reorganisation of Industry. 
It has insisted on Peace — the status quo — avoidance of all 
attempts to resettle and redistribute the world: it has pro- 
tested against the consolidation of all vast states, and above 
all against the formation of all military empires. This 
policy, our central policy for the West, has been much more 
than the mere cry for Peace. We are no simple Peace So- 
ciety, without a policy, appealing to mere repugnance to 
bloodshed and waste. Our policy has been an active one, a 
policy of efficient maintenance of peace. We have asked, 
in words more earnest and consistent, we make bold to say, 
than any of the new school of imperialists, that the weight 
of England should make itself felt in the world; that our 
whole power should be committed to maintain a policy ; that 
England should play a great part and speak with a voice of 
authority in the councils of Europe. Who is a patriot, filled 
with the high memories of our glorious name, staunch to 
make every sacrifice to continue that heroic tradition to our 
children and our children's children to the twentieth genera- 
tion, if we (whose very religion is regard for our heroic an- 
cestors) are not amongst such men? But our policy has 
been Peace, the active maintenance of the actual settlement, 
the protection of the weak, the resistance of the strong. 

Nor has it been any knight-errant policy that we called for. 
Our policy was to use the whole might of our great nation to 
prevent the outbreak of war, to discourage and, if need be, 
stand in arms against all violent recasting of the map of 
Europe, to call round us a confederation of the Powers in- 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 241 

terested in peace, to strengthen the weak Power menaced, and 
to defeat the ambition of the aggressor. It is an English, not 
an Asiatic policy. Who can overrate the power of such a 
nation as England, had it been consistently and firmly pushed, 
not in defence of British interests and menaced empire, but 
in the spirit of Elizabeth, of Cromwell, of William III., to 
defeat the schemes of aggrandisement from one side or from 
the other, and to place itself at the head of all the Powers in 
Europe who seriously desired the maintenance of order? 
Our steady demand has been for a policy which might give 
rest and calm to Europe, and turn all Governments from 
their foreign schemes of conquest to the one work that awaits 
them — the social reorganisation of industry, and the estab- 
lishment of a progressive, less centralised, less bureaucratic 
system of government. 

We have protested against the encouragement of any 
scheme of territorial aggression, however plausibly veiled, 
and whatever the incidental gain which it seemed to promise 
for the moment. Certainly we have called out, as loudly 
as any, for the free development of every distinct nationality, 
for the free development of the Irish and the Indian races, as 
well as for the free development of the races of the Balkans 
or the banks of the Danube. We are against all oppression 
of conquered by their conquerors; we look for the dissolu- 
tion of these empires of conquest ; we desire decentralisation 
of vast political communities, and not a never-ending system 
of annexations; and, above all, we protest against military 
government in every form. But we protest against it in 
Calcutta or Dublin, in Algeria or Paris, in Berlin or Moscow, 
in Rome or Madrid, quite as much as, and even more than, 
we protest against military government in Constantinople and 
the Balkans. We do not pick and choose our oppressed 
nationalities to be favoured with the blessings of self-govern- 



242 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

ment. And it may be that, with bleeding hearts and almost 
overwhelmed with the cry of horrible sufferings and slavery, 
we may have still to turn aside from fair-seeming projects of 
redemption, of oppressed Christians in the Balkans, or in 
Asia Minor, when we find them but the masque of a merciless 
lust of dominion even more dangerous to the future of man- 
kind; when we know them to be the signal in Europe of a 
fresh epoch of conquest, war, and imperial ambition; when 
we see them to mean the extermination of one population in 
the very act of protecting another. 

Where might Russia be at this moment, in peace and 
prosperity; where would Europe be, if the Czars had fol- 
lowed the course which Auguste Comte urged on their Gov- 
ernment more than a generation since: to abstain from all 
interference with the Western nations outside their own vast 
dominions, and to devote their power to the social elevation 
of their half-civilised people? Again, what a different con- 
dition was in store for France, had she set herself to develop 
her long social revolution by a policy of decentralisation, by 
freeing the labour of the workmen, by abolishing all spiritual 
interference in the state, by the simple maintenance of 
Order with full liberty of speech, of association, of conscience. 
We who have always insisted that the Government of France 
must be profoundly republican and essentially social, but 
still the government of men and not of assemblies or of mobs, 
are hardly surprised that in spite of the triumph of the re- 
public, and of Universal Suffrage, all parties in France feel 
how much is yet to be desired. We, at any rate, have never 
been superstitious believers in Democracy. We have never 
thought it was enough to proclaim the republic and then 
rush to the ballot-boxes. We believe and trust that the 
establishment of the republic in France is the signal, as it is 
the evidence, of a new era about to open for the West. But 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 243 

we never shall believe that the future of France is secure, 
until she has found a Government and men to direct it. 

To turn to our own country, we note that the three great 
questions which are pressing on our people to-day are the 
three burning problems, of which for a generation Positivism 
has called for an active treatment — the condition of produc- 
tive industry, the state of Ireland, the ever-growing Empire. 

To-day in the midst of suffering and dejection, as for so 
many years past in the hour of its prosperity and pride, Posi- 
tivism appeals to the territorial lords of this soil to recognise 
how unwholesome and exceptional a system is that on which 
the agricultural industry of this country is based; a system 
unknown in any people in the world, in any age in history. 
To-day, as for a generation, Positivism repeats its appeal 
to the ruling class in England, in Scotland, and in Ireland, 
that the sole condition on which the social order of these 
islands can be maintained is by the systematic recasting of 
the feudal and semi-military settlement of industry into a 
social and purely industrial settlement. The ornamental 
squire, the dependent tenant, the hopeless labourer, are 
things of the past, of the corruption of chivalry, and of the 
degradation of industry. We have been told, on high au- 
thority, that there must always be three classes planted on 
British land, and maintained out of the products of its fruits. 
We repeat as firmly as ever that there is room in these islands, 
there is justification in history (I will not say for two classes 
only) but for two functions only — that of the energetic and 
enlightened director of manual labour, and that of the dis- 
ciplined and educated workman. 

Again, in the hour of gloom, famine, and repression, we 
repeat what we have claimed for Ireland in good times and 
in bad times — that she be treated as a substantive people, 
one of the most interesting of the West, entitled to a Gov- 



244 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

ernment that shall satisfy her legitimate craving for national 
existence. Would that we could see the end of this ill- 
omened and historic struggle to crush the Irish people into 
the mass of the British people. This is not the place or the 
occasion on which we can usefully consider the precise 
scheme — perhaps one may say the indefinite scheme — that 
is known as Home Rule, much less the details of any ques- 
tion of land reform. We who are far from believing that a 
Parliament of any kind is the panacea of a national crisis, are 
not prepared to think that the difficulties of Ireland will be 
solved merely by a Parliament in Dublin. 

We are not about to propose — we have never proposed — 
the erection of Ireland into a foreign state. But we call out 
now with all the increased energy that comes from increas- 
ing acuteness of the evil, not for more bayonets, more sus- 
pension of law, more menaces to the Irish people, but for a 
Government of the Irish people in Ireland, and from Ireland 
— a Government in the interests of the Irish people, not 
from the British point of view, or the point of view of Saxon- 
ised landlords. The Irish peasant has as good a claim to be 
protected in the enjoyment of the soil on which he labours, and 
which his labour creates again, as the corporation or squire 
who has been imposed upon him as his landlord by a foreign 
law that he could not resist. We complain of the mockery 
of forcing a system of contract, and an alien law of contract, 
a system of competition and the higgling of the market, on a 
people who are hardly in the stage of contract or competi- 
tion at all, who refuse to accept that law, and who are not 
really free to contract, nor sufficiently independent to com- 
pete. By enforcing prematurely a system of contract and 
foreign law on the Indian peasantry, they are being pauper- 
ised and ruined: by a similar process the Irish peasant is 
driven by millions into exile. 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 245 

But it is chiefly, in this time of shame and affliction, that 
we would raise our voices against the revival of the worst 
tradition of the past — an empire of conquest and domination. 
We condemn this war in which the heroic Zulu people have 
been decimated, as evil in every circumstance, instigated by 
ambition, without a single solid reason, condemned by the 
very Ministry which in so weak and craven a way has adopted 
and prosecuted it. It is a war, too, carried out with every 
circumstance of cruel injustice and insolent barbarity. We 
condemn it not simply as being an act of unprovoked war, 
but as distorting and poisoning our whole system of relations 
with the African races; as laying the foundations of a new 
African empire of crime and oppression; as kindling the 
worst passions throughout the fibres of our entire colonial 
system. We condemn it furthermore on the ground of the 
exceptional heroism of the people who were its victims, and 
of the great man who was beginning to form them into a 
nation. We condemn it most of all because it has blotted 
out one of those nascent peoples from whom alone the future 
civilisation of Africa can be hoped. 1 

The war for the subjugation of the Afghan races, a war 
almost equally wanton and cruel, presents to our eyes the 
additional element of evil that it must throw back the task 
of administering our Indian empire. A war which, to every 
circumstance of injustice, bad faith, and barbarity, adds to 
the crushing load of exaction wrung from 200 millions of 
our fellow-subjects, a war by which a military dominion 
is yet further militarised, religious hatreds are kindled anew, 
and the race feud, the secular antagonism between con- 
querors and conquered, is traced in deeper and bloodier 
lines upon the memory: such a war is a real calamity in 

1 The Zulu war of 1879 has since been followed by many a similar African 
war (1908). 



246 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the history of England. With all our force we have pro- 
tested against it ; and, again, with all the strength of religious 
conviction, we call upon the conscience of our countrymen 
to clear themselves from this portentous offence. 

We see in this war another example of the moral dangers 
with which our whole imperial system is beset ; and we have 
not hesitated to make our voices heard in the special circum- 
stances of bad faith and cruelty with which an unjust war 
has been doubly stained. Having so recently criticised 
the particular conduct of the actual operations, we need 
say no more to-day of the almost unexampled enormity of 
hanging as rebels and marauders the soldiers and priests 
who resisted the invasion of an unoffending people. 1 

We who look forward to a human religion can hope but 
little from the Churches in dealing with this Central Asian 
crime. The official priests of the old faiths accept without 
questioning the authorised judgment of the political Govern- 
ment. They are engaged, in obedience to the Primate, in 
calling upon their God of Battles (can it be, their God of 
Mercy ?) to keep the British soldiers — the invaders, the 
burners of villages, the hangmen of priests — in his good 
and holy keeping. The ministers of any theological faith 
are not prepared to argue these national undertakings with 
the temporal power. The priests of an Establishment 
accept the worldly policy of the official Government. It 
will not be so with a human faith. The religion of Human- 
ity has its kingdom in this world, and it is its special privi- 
lege to treat the great questions of the age as matters of 
practical politics with full knowledge, with a close and inde- 
pendent judgment of every argument in the statesman's 
craft. We make bold to say that Positivism stands alone 

1 The Afghan war of 1879-80 has been followed by some similar Indian 
expeditions, as in Burmah, Tibet, etc. (1908). 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 247 

amongst religions in treating politics from the point of view 
of politicians, or rather with the knowledge of politicians; 
because it is an essential part of that religion itself to judge 
the true statesmanship from the false, and to uphold the 
principles which lie beneath all statesmanship whatever. 

But in a far deeper sense do these distant crimes concern 
us, more than they concern the theologies of the day. In 
the religion of Humanity there are no distinctions of skin 
or race, of sect or creed; all are our brothers and fellow- 
citizens of the world — children of the same great kith and 
kin. Whether they follow God or the Prophet, Christ or 
Buddha, Confucius or Moses, they are believers in a faith 
which we profoundly venerate; they are all sharers in the 
glorious roll of which we would perpetuate the muster. The 
religion of Humanity is Catholic in a sense that no Christian 
ever was or could be, for it can include the countless millions 
who reject Christ, who passionately cling to another phase 
of religious life, alien and hostile to his. In this very month, 
which we associate with the memory of Moses, the weeks 
are associated with the names of all the great prophets and 
teachers who maintain the religious life of the East: with 
Confucius, Buddha, and Mahomet. We embrace them all 
and honour them all — the great patriarchs and Hebrew 
prophets and kings; the great founders of the empires of 
the East, Zoroaster and his Sun Worship, the Theocrats 
of Tibet, the Theocrats of Japan, the great teachers of China, 
the great chiefs of the Mussulman world. When these 
sacred and heroic names are read round the altars of the 
Christian fanes, then and then only can the religion of Christ 
pretend to the glorious name of Catholic. 

But we of the human religion which we would fain call 
Catholic — if the word Catholic itself had not been so often 
polluted — we, whilst the priests of the Catholic world in 



248 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

its decay are calling down official blessings on the heads 
of those who ravage and kill with no just cause, we can com- 
memorate the sufferings and heroic deaths of tens of thou- 
sands of noble men who gave up their lives for their homes 
and their race in a rude sense of duty to their tribe, men of 
a darker skin than ours, of a lower type of life, in the mere 
beginnings of civilised existence, horribly savage it may be, 
but still our human brothers, our own flesh and blood, fired 
to the last with high and generous souls. Nor will humanity 
suffer us to forget the honourable men of our own people 
who died in this same cruel work in the honest performance 
of their duty, men who did these things of no choice of their 
own, utterly ignorant for the most part, themselves but 
helpless victims of perverse rulers. 

No ! it is not that we have outlived the spirit of patriotism 
and care nothing for the bond of country. It is that we 
earnestly cling to the idea of country, and honour to the 
utmost the brave men who so nobly maintained that sacred 
trust. Those who have wantonly crushed the Zulu nation 
and broken up the Afghan kingdom are they who have 
trampled under foot the duty of patriotism. It is for us to 
insist how precious to the life of the world are these grow- 
ing aggregates of people when the lofty conception of nation 
first comes to supersede the narrower idea of clan or tribe. 
It is we who defend the sacred name of country; it is the 
invader and the conqueror that drag it in the dust. 

Above all, we would make it clear that it is in no spirit 
of party that we speak. Our horror of these foreign crimes 
is not bred afresh in us at the prospect of a general election. 
To those who for a generation have protested against the 
empire of conquest and domination, it is little comfort 
whether Whig or Tory be in power, it is little that we hope 
from a change of party. For a generation we have called 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 249 

out against every extension of our empire, against every 
fresh act of military or commercial ambition, against the 
military oppression of India, against the opium wars in 
China, the wars to break into Japan, against the opium 
monopoly in India, against the Burmese wars, and the wars 
in New Zealand, in the Cape, in Abyssinia, in Ashantee, 
in Zululand, in Afghanistan: and we have called out in 
vain, whether a Liberal or a Conservative Ministry might 
chance to be in power. Quae caret ora cruore nostro ? What 
race, which hemisphere, what latitude, has not seen the 
unsheathed sword of Britain? These crimes are the work 
of the military and commercial aristocracy of England. 
They are not the special work of Lord Beaconsneld or the 
party he leads. 

For twenty years and more we have sought to make our 
voices heard when Hindoos were being blown from guns 
and hunted like wild beasts ; when negroes were being flogged 
and hung in a ferocious and ignoble panic; when Chinese 
Governments were being forced to receive a poison, and 
Japanese Governments were being bombarded into receiving 
our goods ; when African and Asian tribes were being butch- 
ered on one worthless pretext after another, the real end 
being always a sordid lust of new markets. And to us who 
know all this it seems like a mockery indeed to hear the new- 
blown horror in some patriots of a war of conquest and 
aggression. 

A party attack upon an unjust war, even a genuine protest 
against exceptional barbarity, will tell but little in the long 
run, whilst the governing classes of this nation maintain and 
defend the system of military empire. An empire gained 
by the sword, to be maintained by the sword, to be consoli- 
dated in the spirit of the sword, an empire to supply the 
political and military classes with careers, and the commer- 



250 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

cial classes with markets, to be a source of profit and glory > 
to be to England of to-day what the West Indies were to Spain, 
what the Levant was to Venice — an empire which is to be 
above and outside of all discussion, something that makes 
everything lawful, and for which everything must be suffered, 
or committed, or risked — whilst this empire is the founda- 
tion of the governing system of the entire governing class, 
protests against particular crimes are idle words. An em- 
pire built up step by step, in blood and fraud, in rapacity 
and race ascendancy, without one thought of morality, or 
anything but selfish advantage, is not likely to be main- 
tained by mere expressions of good-will, cannot possibly 
exist without terrible struggles and catastrophes. It is in 
vain for a political party to invent a nickname for their 
opponents, and to call heaven to witness that this new and 
unheard-of depravity is the source of every national offence. 
Imperialism is the creed of all who find in the military em- 
pire the glory and the strength of England. And they form 
the bulk of the official and governing classes, under which- 
ever political chief they are sworn to serve. 

To us this empire is something far other, very contrary 
indeed to the glory and gain of England. It is her grand 
responsibility and danger. It is an anomaly, a huge excres- 
cence, an abnormal and morbid growth of this fair island 
and its people. It is the work of that wild orgy of indus- 
trial energy that marked the last century, the plunge of an 
energetic race into a mercantile and colonial saturnalia — 
much as our neighbours in France plunged headlong into 
a social and political saturnalia. That empire is a vast 
collection of distant and disparate countries and races, in- 
capable of assimilation with each other or with us, scattered 
over the planet in every phase of civilisation, with every 
variation of history ; differing in religion, manners, race, and 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 25 1 

capabilities. It is unlike every empire that ever existed; 
unlike the old Roman empire, unlike the actual Russian 
empire, unlike even the bad old Spanish and Venetian em- 
pires — inasmuch as it is ten times as vast and fifty times 
as complex. Duly and rightly to govern, in the high and 
true sense of the word (that is, wisely to develop the life and 
energies of these scattered peoples) would demand the 
strength, the wealth, the enlightenment, the moral conscience 
of fifty Englands. Our one England is utterly incapable 
of this superhuman task. And it is the failure in the attempt 
that is the shame and rebuke of England. 

An empire which, like that of Russia, forms in one terri- 
tory a homogeneous state, alike in religion, race, law, and 
manners, has a raison d'etre, however vast and unwieldy. 
But an empire which consists of fragments geographically 
incapable of union ; where every fact of race, religion, habit, 
and feeling makes incorporation and fellow-citizenship hope- 
less even in the most distant future ; this remains stamped 
as an aggregate of dependencies and not an empire. But 
an aggregate of dependencies which is for ever disturbed 
and menaced, and for ever awaiting or forestalling attack, 
which contributes nothing to the home government in money, 
or men, or resources of any kind, is not a strength but an 
increasing weakness. It must pull down the strongest race 
that ever trod the earth; and as it pulls them down, it will 
hurry them from one crime to another. 

What can be done is this. The government of such an 
empire by thirty millions of men in a petty island of the 
West is impossible. But it may be garrisoned; it may be 
occupied ; it may be held for a few years longer with a hard 
mechanical pressure, securing external order but repressing 
all true national life; it may furnish markets; the wealth, 
and energy, and dauntless heart of our race may keep up 



252 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the specious fabric for another generation or two, breaking 
ever now and again into further seas of blood, more con- 
quests, more vengeance, ever sliding down the slope of tyr- 
anny, cruelty, and panic. But it cannot be for ever. The 
unwieldy and unorganised mass may break into fragments 
at any day under internal convulsion or foreign attack. 
But till that day comes, it may still be held by sheer force 
of energy, as a source of profit for the moment to special 
classes of Englishmen, corrupting the true fibre of the nation, 
and really paralysing it for every duty in Europe and at 
home. It is impossible to govern this empire, as it ought 
to be governed, for the sake of its members, or so as to assist 
in the true progress of our people; it is possible to defend 
it for a season, at the cost of the subjects who compose 
it, and at the sacrifice of all that is truly great in 
England. 

England is not herself, whilst she is forced thus to keep 
anxious and suspicious watch across Africa and Asia over 
her huge and precarious prize. Our statesmen, our jour- 
nalists, our preachers, come bound to every question of policy 
and morality by the silent influence of a half-uttered thought 
— "Come what may, the empire must be saved." For this, 
they close their ears, and harden their hearts, when black 
and brown men are being massacred and despoiled; when 
Cetewayo and Langabalele are shamefully kept in prison, 
and Theodore and Shere Ali are hunted to death. As a 
system of slavery prepares the slave-holding caste for any 
inhumanity that may seem to defend it, so an empire of 
subjects trains up the imperial race to every injustice and 
deadens them to any form of selfishness. 

And if it hardens our politicians, it degrades our Churches. 
The thirst for rule, the greed of the market, and the saving 
of souls, all work in accord together. The Churches ap- 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 



253 



prove and bless whilst the warriors and the merchants are 
adding new provinces to the empire; they have delivered 
the heathen to the secular arm, and they hope one day to 
convert them to the truth. An absolute creed, salvation 
through Christ, of necessity tend to an anti-human work; 
they forgive the rapacity of the trader ; they inflame, instead 
of checking, the rage of war. Christianity in practice, as 
we know it now, for all the Sermon on the Mount, is the 
religion of aggression, domination, combat. It waits upon 
the pushing trader and the lawless conqueror; and with 
obsequious thanksgiving it blesses his enterprise. 

We will not believe that our sound-hearted people can 
for ever continue in this career of evil. There is a national 
conscience; and when it stirs, the most imposing empires 
totter and break up beneath it. To us this empire is the 
great load upon the future of our country, almost upon the 
future of the world. It can be transformed first and shaken 
off at last by no political party — by nothing but a religious 
movement. What slavery and the slave trade once were 
to our grandfathers here, what a slave industry and a slave 
society were to the Americans of yesterday, that empire is 
becoming to Englishmen to-day. A cry of emancipation, 
as of a religious duty to redress the sufferings of humanity, 
is rising up here too. Our people have no share in this guilt, 
as they have none in the gain or the glory. A small band in 
a religious sense of duty raised their voices against the crime 
of slavery, and the slave trade and English slavery passed 
away like a nightmare from our dreams. Again a small 
band of religious believers and social reformers swore in 
the sight of men that the slave society should be purged 
from their nation: and slavery and the slave society are a 
thing of the past. The strength of the military empire, 
the fury of its partisans, have nothing to compare with their 



254 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

parallel in the slave system in the Southern states. And 
where is that slave system now ? 

We are no fanatics, no blind abolitionists: we claim to 
be politicians, and even conservative politicians. We have 
no crude project for abandoning the empire to-morrow like 
a leaky ship, or handing it over to confusion or chance, as 
a prey to new conquerors. We will consider all these ques- 
tions, each in its own field, each pro re nata, and with all 
the data of political science. We do not pretend that the 
blind conquests of former ages can be resettled in a day, or 
that we ought to fling off the tremendous responsibilities 
with which ages of history have burdened us. But this we 
do say: the heterogeneous empire must be regarded as a 
passing responsibility, and not as a permanent greatness of 
our country. It must be administered with an honest desire 
to avoid all fresh strife, and the ground of further oppression. 
To increase its burdens and its limits should be a public 
crime. To secure peace in it, for peace is its one justifica- 
tion, should be the first of public duties. In the meantime 
it must be governed in the sole interest of the countless mill- 
ions who compose it; and not only in their interest, but in 
their spirit, until the time shall arrive when, part by part, 
it may be developed into normal and national life of its own. 

If this cannot be done, if it cannot be begun at once, would 
that this huge crime against mankind could be ended by any 
means. To go on as we do now from one outrage on justice 
to another, in the vague hope that some day we may begin 
to do our duty, when all our subjects are perfectly submis- 
sive and all our neighbours are perfectly friendly, is indeed 
mere self-delusion. We can accept neither the selfish plea 
of national glory, nor the specious plea of a civilising mission. 
Nothing that England can gain, nothing that the world can 
gain from this empire, is worth the frightful and increasing 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 255 

price that we pay for it year by year in guilt, and blood, and 
hatred. We listen with wonder to the alternate cries of 
indignation which are raised by our two great parties in the 
state: the one burning to tear to pieces the Mahometan 
empire in the East, the other breathing war against the 
aggressive empire of the Czar. Would that they could re- 
member how they and their successive Governments in turn 
maintain an empire as truly military in its basis as that of 
Turkey or of Russia; one which gives its subject races as 
little free national life as is given in the Ottoman system, 
which engages in more wars of annexation and conquest 
than the Muscovite monarchy itself. 

This inheritance of empire, we have said, forms for our 
England of to-day as great a moral peril as ever tasked a 
great people; yet it is but one of the great problems which 
surround the future of civilisation. A moral peril of some 
different kind hangs over other nations too; the lust of 
dominion, the pride of race, the thirst of fame or gain, fill 
the air with wars and rumours of wars. Within our social 
system there rages the struggle of classes, interests, and am- 
bitions; the passion for wealth, the restlessness of want. 
The future of industry, the cause of education, social justice, 
the very life of the poor, all tremble in the balance in our 
own country, as in other countries: this way or that way 
will decide the well-being of generations to come. 

Are these tremendous issues to be left to themselves or 
chance? Is it enough to say that the spirit of Progress will 
work them right in the end ? Do self-will and self-love ever 
restrain themselves by an enlightened sense of their own true 
interest? Verily we think not; and for this reason we are 
not willing to abandon the greatest and the oldest of all 
human forces — the power of Religion. On religion, to-day 
as of old, there hangs the future of mankind for good or for evil. 



256 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

But if on religion, on what religion? On the religions 
which by their errors and their failures have brought us to 
this pass, and now stand aside with their eyes fixed on things 
above, repeating that their kingdom is not of this world? 
We more and more need a religion that can deal with this 
world, which has something to say to the intellectual and 
social problems of our age, which can show us how to live 
on earth, not how to prepare for heaven. Can we turn to 
Christianity in its latest phase, struggling to adapt its creed 
to common sense, helpless in presence of our social disorders, 
and actually stimulating the passion for war and conquest? 
Or shall we turn to the Deisms and the Theosophies which 
are even more devoid of social doctrine, more impotent to 
control our acts, busy with metaphysical ingenuities about 
the nature of the Godhead or the creation of the world? 
Far from it. We need a Religion that is neither Mysticism 
nor Metaphysics, but one that can explain and enforce 
human duty; which can master men of powerful intellect 
and commanding character; which can make itself felt on 
society : purify it, guide it, transform it. 

To what can we turn, in our wanderings and our needs, 
but to the ever-present idea of Humanity as a whole? It 
recalls us to the sense of fellowship and social duty; it lifts 
us from our interests in the petty group in which we live, to 
brotherhood with the incalculable host which peoples the 
planet ; it takes us from the trivial prize of to-day to the cycle 
of ages that make the past, the present, and the future. The 
multiplicity of human interests in the mass restrains and 
humbles the interest of the unit; the vast sequence of time 
reminds us how we grow ever to a higher state. We set 
before our hopes the civilising and humanising Power, 
gathering force in each new age, and steadily advancing to 
the good and the true. We watch it with our aspirations of 



EMPIRE AND HUMANITY 257 

to-day back to the wild times of social and religious war in 
Europe, thence back to the turmoil of the Middle Ages, 
back as it emerges out of systematic war, out of the inhu- 
manity of the polytheistic ages, out of slavery, out of caste, 
out of nomadism and fetichism and savagery, out of can- 
nibalism, and so back to the lowest degradation of the human 
type. Humanity has sufficed to raise herself, by slow and 
certain stages, from the brutality of the Bushman to the 
dignity of Shakespeare and Descartes. Much more shall 
she suffice to free herself from the dSbris of a feudal and a 
military epoch. 



PART II 
SOCIAL PROBLEMS 



SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

The Second Part of this book is occupied with questions of 
Labour, Unionism, and Socialism, which are now urgent, 
and promise to be even more urgent in the future. Having 
been closely associated for forty-six years with the Labour 
Leaders and with Industrial Reforms, I now collect, in what 
is largely an autobiographic volume, a few of the Essays and 
Addresses that I made public on various occasions. These 
were in no sense casual utterances. Being all based on the 
Positivist theory of Capital and Labour, which I have held 
from youth, they have a systematic character. And at the 
same time they may serve to mark the gradual development of 
public opinion. 

In i860 I was associated at the Working Men's College 
with F. D. Maurice and his colleagues, Thomas Hughes, 
J. M. Ludlow, John Ruskin, Dr. Furnivall, and many others, 
teachers and students. In 1862 I joined with T. Hughes, 
R. H. Hutton, Godfrey Lushington, in a public controversy 
upon the great London lock-out in the Building Trades, and I 
became intimate with the directors of the great Amalgamated 
Unions. In the following years I visited the northern manu- 
facturing centres, and studied the Unions, Co-operative, 
Owenite, and Industrial movements of Lancashire and 
Yorkshire. 

In i86j, without my knowledge or consent, I was announced 
in Parliament as a Member of the Trades Union Commission, 
on which I served in the years 1867-8-Q; and I drew the 
Minority Report, which became the basis of subsequent Legis- 

261 



262 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

lation. The long agitation to obtain a settlement of the laws 
affecting workmen, together with frequent visits to manufac- 
turing centres, to Trades Union, Co-operative, and other 
Labour Congresses, brought me into close relations with many 
working-class leaders, and gave me an intimate knowledge 
of the working of their societies. In 1883 I organised the In- 
dustrial Remuneration Conference, founded by Robert Miller 
of Edinburgh, of which Sir Charles Dilke was the President, 
and which was addressed by him, by Lord Bramwell, Mr. 
Arthur J. Balfour, Lord Brassey, Sir Robert Giffen, Mr. John 
Burns, Professor Beesly, Professor A. R. Wallace, and others. 

As President of the English Positivist Committee from 
1879, I continually put forward the industrial scheme of 
Auguste Comte on the platform and in the Press, down to the 
settlement of the Labour legislation in iqoj. 

The six Essays in this Part II. deal in turn with the " Ortho- 
dox^ Plutonomy, which I repudiated in the first volume of the 
Fortnightly Review in 1865, with Trades Unionism, and with 
Co-operation — all three written in the same year. They are 
followed by the Address given to the Industrial Conference of 
1885; by an Essay on the Socialist type of Unionism, i88g; 
and finally by the Address on Moral and Religious Socialism 
of 1 89 1. 

This sums up the views on the Labour Problem which I 
have consistently maintained for upwards of forty years {1908). 



THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 

(1865) 

On the foundation of the Fortnightly Review in 1865, by 
Anthony Trollope, W. Bagehot, George H. Lewes, and 
George Eliot, I was invited by the Editor, G. H. Lewes, 
to write on the great Iron Trade Dispute in Staffordshire. 
In the third number, June 1865, 1 wrote the present Essay 
on the Limits of Political Economy. It is, I think, the 
earliest systematic criticism of the entire basis of the 
"Orthodox" Economy by a student of that so-called 
"science," who was in close relations with some of its 
ablest professors, and in complete agreement with many 
of its theoretic doctrines. 

The criticism was not at all derived from Carlyle's 
growls about the "dismal science," nor from Ruskin's 
sentimental diatribes in his book — Unto this Last. My 
views were based on Comte J s philosophic proof that 
Economic dogmas become both false and mischievous when 
detached from Social science as a whole. I was myself a 
member of the Political Economy Club, and was in 
relations with John Stuart Mill, Professor Cairnes, and 
other eminent economists. I fully recognised the value of 
many economic researches if kept in strict subordina- 
tion to Sociology; but I earnestly repudiated the claim 
to erect these into an independent science — much less to 
make these theories practical rules of society and life. 
263 



264 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Now that the old Plutonomy is almost a thing of the 
past, I reissue what I believe was one of the earliest 
efforts to shake off its tyranny (igo8). 



The "phenomena of society being more complicated than any 
other, it is irrational to study the industrial apart from 
the intellectual and moral" — Auguste Comte. 

For the evils which beset our industrial system several par- 
tial remedies, and but one general remedy, is suggested. 
Trades Unions, courts of arbitration, limited partnership, 
co-operation, are obviously remedies both limited in their 
sphere and remote in their effect. That to which the culti- 
vated public agree to look is the general diffusion of the prin- 
ciples of economic science. It becomes, therefore, essential 
to know what economic science is; what are its limits; and 
what are its functions. 

Few opinions are more rooted in the mind of our industrial 
nation than this : that there is a science of production, defi- 
nite, distinct, and exact — the axioms of which are as uni- 
versal and demonstrable as those of astronomy ; the practical 
rules of which are as simple and familiar as those of arith- 
metic. Economists, it is believed, have worked out a sys- 
tem of general truths, which any shrewd man of business can 
practically apply. We are very proud of our great writers 
who have created this science, and not a little fond of the 
skill with which it is handled by newspapers, speakers, and 
men of business. It is the intellectual feat of our age, the 
sign of our civilisation, and the cause of our wealth. 

But when we come to study the science, we certainly do 
not find this agreement amongst its professors. Agreement 
is the last thing they think of. There are, indeed, few sub- 
jects of human thought on which there is less. There are 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 265 

hardly ten generalisations in the whole science on which all 
the writers are at one, and that not on the details but on the 
first principles, not on intricate points of practice but on the 
general laws of production. 

What is the true theory of rent? Who is right about 
currency? What are the laws of population? Are small 
farms or large farms best? Does the peasant proprietor 
thrive? Define the "wages fund." What decides the re- 
muneration of labour? State some of the laws of the accu- 
mulation of profits. Give the ratio of the relative increase 
of population, and the means of subsistence. What are the 
economical results of direct and indirect taxation? of strict 
entails? of trade unions? of poor-laws? of Free Trade? 
Let us suppose these questions asked from a body of econo- 
mists, and we should have them at cross-purposes in a mo- 
ment. M'Culloch would expose "the erroneous views of 
Smith," Ricardo and Malthus would confute each other, 
and scarcely one would admit the philosophical bases of 
Mr. Mill. We find ourselves not in a science properly so 
called at all, but in a collection of warm controversies on 
social questions. What would be the state of medicine if 
physiologists were hotly disputing on the circulation of the 
blood? 

No rational economist can claim for his subject the title 
of an independent and recognised science. He is content 
at most with systematic dissertations. The greatest of all 
since the founder of this study in England, Mr. Mill, is, in 
truth, not an economist at all. He is a social philosopher, 
who has thought and written on all the chief departments of 
the philosophy of society, who in his great work deals with 
economic laws as part of and subordinate to social laws. 
Neither in theory nor in practice has this powerful thinker, 
much less have his profound predecessors, Hume, Turgot, 



266 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

and Adam Smith, ever countenanced the notion that the 
laws of production, as a whole, can be studied or discovered 
apart from all the other laws of society, without any reference 
to the great social problems, by men who have no fixed 
notions upon them, or none but a few unverified hypotheses ; 
who are without a system of politics, a theory of human 
nature, a philosophy of history, or a code of social duty. 

Unfortunately, this truth has not been generally grasped, 
and the name of economist has been claimed by men whose 
qualifications are limited to some acquaintance with statistics 
and a talent for tabular statements. There has gone abroad, 
too, under their shelter, a very prevalent belief that economic 
questions are fixed and defined as no other social problems 
are. Men who hold the application of theory to politics to 
be mischievous pedantry, men who regard the science of 
human nature as an atheist's dream, are quite content to 
believe that one fragment of it is a science by itself ; a science 
so simple and complete that practical points of detail can be 
accurately deduced from its rules. A whole literature of 
spurious economics exists, wherein the postulates of the sub- 
ject, the great laws of human nature, are gratuitously assumed 
without a thought or a doubt. The consequence is a tissue 
of statements about industry which are as true to fact as 
ZadkiePs almanack is true to events; and a tissue of pre- 
tended laws of industry by which selfishness glosses over to 
itself the frightful consequences of its own passions. 

The truth really is (and a very moderate reflection ought 
to show it), that whatever the difficulties of a systematic 
science of society, the same difficulties meet the science of 
industrial life; that all the cautions which are needed in 
applying social laws to action cannot be dispensed with simply 
because the action in question is industry. Secondly, it will 
appear that the attempt to deal with the facts of production 



LIMITS OR POLITICAL ECONOMY 267 

separately from other facts of society can be carried only to a 
very limited extent, and under very strict conditions. Thirdly, 
that the attempt to generalise absolutely from certain special 
phases of modern civilisation is a radical and very dangerous 
error. It results from the combined effect of these causes 
that the popular conception of the functions of Political 
Economy is very wide of its true place both in philosophy 
and politics. 



Political economy professes to systematise the laws of 
production and distribution. It analyses the creation of 
wealth. It lays down the theory of material industry. It 
is obvious that every act of production, all industry, in short, 
is due to an effort of the human will. It forms a certain class 
of the things that men do. It is determined by all the com- 
bined motives which precede action. Men do not labour or 
accumulate involuntarily any more than they fight or pray 
involuntarily. In our age we see many men labouring and 
accumulating under the influence of one leading motive, and 
we can hardly conceive this motive ceasing to be powerful. 
But in one bygone age we should have seen them righting 
under a dominant motive; in another age, praying under 
a dominant motive ; in another, doing both together under a 
motive so dominant that few persons then could conceive it 
less strong. In the ages of faith, fighting and praying seemed 
to come by instinct from "immutable laws of society," to be 
natural results of uncontrollable tendencies. We have lived 
to see that men can do both or either in the most different 
ways, under totally different motives, in opposite social states, 
and indeed can cease in a great measure to do either. 

It may be objected that a certain amount of labour and 
accumulation to satisfy the physical wants of life is necessary 



268 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

in a sense in which no other form of activity is. Men must 
overcome hunger and cold if they live at all. Doubtless; 
but the Bushman does this, and so does the Gipsy. The 
minimum is too small to be worth consideration. All between 
this and our modern industry is in the truest sense voluntary. 
For all practical purposes, then, production is only a branch 
of free human activity ; liable, like it, to every modification 
which altered motives produce. Labour and accumulation 
might be almost indefinitely increased or diminished, as the 
motives in which they now originate were stimulated or 
declined. They might also remain at their present or change 
to any other level, and spring from a totally different set of 
motives, and under totally fresh conditions. Man of course 
is limited by his own physical powers and the general con- 
ditions of matter ; but with our present intellectual resources 
these limits are so vast in civilised countries, that, practically, 
man's industrial life is quite at his own disposal. Produc- 
tion, accumulation, and distribution might be varied almost 
without limit, both in extent, mode, and proportion, provided 
we could vary the motives which actuate conduct. In other 
words, the forms of our industrial life — the laws of wealth, 
in short — depend on the sum of our actual civilisation. 

A truth so simple as this has been so much obscured by 
economic sophisms that a little illustration may not be out of 
place. In the first place, no one who reflects can fail to see 
how completely our present industry is the creation of our 
present ideas and feelings. Men produce and accumulate 
incessantly around us chiefly from the influence of a desire 
of wealth or useful things. But it is obvious that this desire 
might very easily become incalculably feebler, and that pro- 
duction and accumulation might be indefinitely less. As a 
matter of history, we know that in almost every age of human 
life it has been far weaker than with us now ; and that it is 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 269 

only in certain fractions of one race of human kind that it is 
as strong as it is now. When we compare the industrial 
energy of an Englishman or an American with that of an 
Arab, of a modern European with that of an ancient Greek, 
we can see hardly any limit to the variety of degree in which 
the love of wealth may stimulate human beings to action. 
Nor is it even the invariable associate of high intelligence 
and cultivation. On the contrary, classical and Oriental 
society abound with examples of high intellectual condition, 
as religious society throughout the world abounds with ex- 
amples of high moral condition, with a minimum of pro- 
duction and accumulation. In a word, the instinct and the 
habit of production are just as variable. as human nature. 

The second case, that production and accumulation might 
follow from other than the prevalent motives which now 
largely stimulate them, is somewhat less obvious but not less 
true. In vast permanent societies, in long ages of history, 
populations such as the Egyptian and the Indian, under a 
strict caste system, have shown an astonishing degree of 
industry, directly stimulated by habit, social feeling and 
religious duty, and, in a very slight degree, by personal desire 
of gain. In religious societies under very different kinds of 
faith, very active industry, on a scale quite decisive as an 
experiment, has been stimulated by purely religious motives. 
Some of the most splendid results of industry ever recorded, 
— the clearing of wildernesses; vast public works, such as 
bridges, monuments, and temples ; the training of whole races 
of savages into habits of toil, — have been accomplished by 
purely religious bodies on purely religious motives, by monks, 
missionaries, and priests. In China, in which there is, per- 
haps, the most universal of all industries, labour is stimulated 
by motives mainly domestic, partly personal, but in scarcely 
any degree by the desire of accumulation. In practical 



270 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

slavery, which we must never forget is or has been the basis 
of a vast portion of human industry, labour is obviously due 
to other motives than that of the acquisition of gain : in very 
low cases, to force and fear ; in very favourable instances of 
ancient slavery and modern serfdom, partly to personal 
affection, partly to habit, as we often see in the domestic 
animals. 

These are the extremes ; but between these cases and our 
own industry there is every shade of motive and spirit from 
which systematic industry has sprung. We are all familiar 
with noble instances of labour in every sphere, under all con- 
ditions, from which every trace of personal interest has been 
withdrawn. It would be as degrading to suppose that the 
great industrial benefactors of mankind, whether inventors, 
capitalists, or labourers, have been moved by the mere love- 
of acquisition, as that our great intellectual benefactors have 
been moved by mere motives of vanity, or the practical by 
mere thirst for power. 

Industry has never been so systematically stimulated by 
motives of religious duty or affection as some other forms of 
activity in earlier civilisations; but no historical observer 
would deny that it is perfectly possible that it should be. If 
any society had been educated for labour with the same 
consensus of moral and social forces which trained the early 
Romans for war, and the Israelites in the desert for worship, 
we should have had the case of a people in whom industry 
was singularly developed, and the desire of gain practically 
extinct. In a word, the studies of human nature and history 
combine to prove that industrial activity may be organised, 
and in a great degree is now organised, on moving princi- 
ples, as various and complex as the character of man him- 
self. 

It is nothing to the purpose to object that the case just 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 27 1 

suggested is possible only under the most singular conditions, 
and, if possible, is very far from desirable. There is not the 
slightest probability of our seeing a state of society in which 
industry should be solely dependent on religious, moral, or 
social motives. Industry and accumulation might possibly 
be diminished by any sudden admixture of such motives. 
Industry, as a whole, might exist where motives of self- 
interest were supplemented, superseded, and controlled by a 
range of various motives in almost infinite proportions. We 
know as a fact that whole societies and races of men have 
pursued objects far less accordant with human nature than 
industry, under the influence of complex motives, derived 
from many forms of human character. We know as a fact 
that men have given themselves to industry under the influ- 
ence of every form of it alternately, and of many forms in 
many combinations. It would be as ridiculous to place in- 
dustry on the basis of one special kind of the egoistic instincts, 
or on all together, as it would be to make another of them 
the sole source of religion, another of politics, another of 
thought. Human action, of which industry is but a part, is 
moved by the sum of the human capacities and instincts ; and 
of these such as minister to personal enjoyment are not sole 
or paramount. Nor does industry depend more on these 
latter than human life itself. To hold it to be inseparable 
from them is possible only on theories of human nature which 
revive the moral sophisms of Hobbes, or the political cynicism 
of Machiavelli. 

However much these propositions may sound like truisms, 
it may be doubted if their full meaning is present to those 
who deal with the labours of Economists, or indeed to Econo- 
mists themselves. On the contrary, the logical consequences 
may seem startling to most of them. When, for instance, it 
is said to be a law of Political Economy that the rate of wages 



272 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

depends on the demand and supply of labour ; that capitalists 
will seek to pay the lowest, and workmen to obtain the high- 
est, possible wages; that capital will seek the market where 
there is the greatest percentage, and labour the market where 
there is the highest remuneration, — all that is meant is, that 
this will happen where or so long as the love of gain, the 
effective desire of accumulation, the desire of useful things, 
holds precisely the same relative position in the human 
motives as it does to-day in England in the year 1865. 

The law is gone the moment this position is changed. 
The law is never in fact absolutely true. This particular 
motive to labour varies as civilisation varies in every con- 
ceivable degree. It is never perhaps wholly absent. It is 
never certainly exclusively dominant. Perhaps no single 
case can be found of one capitalist or one workman whose 
industrial conduct is never influenced by some motive derived 
from custom, public opinion, sense of duty, or benevolence. 
There have been cases on the largest scale in which industrial 
energy has been influenced almost solely by these, or one of 
these. Precisely as these very variable motives vary in 
efficiency, industry will be more, or will be less, under the 
impetus of competition. 

The limits of variation in both directions are almost in- 
calculable. We see it in the difference of one age with 
another. We see it in the differences of one people with 
another. And we see it in the differences of one individual 
with another. If all capitalists were as eager for accumula- 
tion as some rare examples are now, capital might be enor- 
mously increased. If all capitalists were as little under the 
influence of acquisitive motives as some whom we know, 
accumulation might be vastly reduced, other influences re- 
maining the same. Many great employers of labour (such 
as landed proprietors) are in a very slight degree governed 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 273 

by competition in the management of their estates. Many 
workmen, as agricultural labourers, are almost solely under 
the impulse of habit. In parts of Europe men of activity 
and intelligence are so little under the influence of competi- 
tion, that markets separated by a few miles have widely 
different prices. 

We all know that in many of our daily dealings we are very 
largely out of its sphere. The wages of the superior domes- 
tic servants are comparatively beyond it. In a great many 
occupations (as in the public services, arts, and sciences) the 
influence of competition tells only very slowly and indirectly. 
It cannot therefore be the sole regulator there. In fact, there 
is perhaps no single trade in which the force of competition, 
left without restraint, would not diminish wages. It is also 
certain that the annals of the human race exhibit competition 
as a paramount force only in certain parts of Europe in very 
recent times. These laws, therefore, of political economy 
depend on an assumption about human character and society, 
which is totally untrue of the great bulk of human history, 
and not exactly true of any single community or individual 
even now. 

What is really meant by saying that wages and profits 
follow such and such a law, is to state that which is an approxi- 
mate generalisation of one particular form of civilisation. Of 
course this can in no sense be a law of human society. If it 
were, it would be true of all times and under all conditions. 
The law that the changes of human life depend on the changes 
of human opinion, is true universally. It is true of the sav- 
age ; it is true of the child. It is based on a study of human 
nature as a whole, and of human history as a whole. But it 
is obvious that most of the laws of Political Economy utterly 
fail to be realised amongst some savage and some Oriental 
races. Still more signally do they fail if applied to an aflec- 



274 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

tionate family or a pure religious community. There the 
assumption on which they rest has no place. 

The laws therefore are entirely relative to the particular 
state of civilisation. Unquestionably, approximate generali- 
sations, having strict reference to a form of society we are 
studying, are of great value, — but only on the condition that 
we never forget their relative character. The laws of political 
economy are essentially abstract and hypothetical. In them 
man is conceived under conditions in which he is never 
actually found, and which indeed could not be actually realised 
whilst human nature remains what it is. Political Economy 
professes to exhibit man exclusively as a producing animal, 
which in fact he never is, and under the influence of special 
motives, by which he is never exclusively actuated. Social 
institutions generally, moral impulses altogether, by the con- 
ditions of the subject, are excluded. Otherwise Political 
Economy would be Social or Moral Philosophy. Political 
Economy, therefore, has two postulates — production as the 
sole end, Competition as the sole motive — postulates of 
which the human race and its history can show no actual 
example. 

Without doubt this may be no obstacle to the great value 
of these theories to the student. The intellectual or the 
moral forces might be similarly studied. But the great, 
indeed the sole value of these special studies, depends on 
their relative character being constantly kept in view. It may 
be asserted, and is no doubt true, that many spheres of in- 
dustry are so far under the rule of Competition that it may 
practically be said to regulate them. Broad generalisations 
may fairly be based on what is the efficient rule. It may be 
said also that this rule of Competition is the best, the most 
perfect condition of society, essential to the ultimate happi- 
ness of mankind, and destined to be developed indefinitely 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 275 

in the future. It may be. But this is precisely the question 
which no economist, as such, is able to decide. Both these 
assumptions are vital problems in the general philosophy of 
society. This and this alone can offer a reasonable answer. 

The economist may be able to decide what is the law of 
civilisation, what is the destiny of society, what are the con- 
ditions of happiness, provided he has satisfied his mind on 
the theory of society, of history, of morals, — of human nature 
as a whole and human society as a whole, — provided he be 
a social philosopher, but only thus. The economist may be 
able to judge to what degree in a particular society competi- 
tion is a dominant motive ; where it is, where it is not, para- 
mount ; how far it is interwoven with social institutions ; 
what in each case is its relative importance as compared with 
other influences — provided he has analysed society as well 
as industry, and has traced the manifold ramifications of 
human activity — provided he be a politician and a moralist 
as well as an economist, but scarcely otherwise. Without 
this knowledge his subject-matter will be liable to variations 
which he not only cannot explain, but which he cannot detect. 
He is working out problems depending on unknown quanti- 
ties which are constantly varying in relative value. None of 
his terms are constants or have a fixed power, but they some- 
times represent one, and sometimes another ; and he has no 
means of ascertaining when this power is changed. 

It is essential to remember that in these industrial problems 
the unknown quantities are never constant, never regular, 
and never calculable by the economist as such. He cannot 
give his solutions in terms of his data, leaving his unknown 
quantities for after investigation. Throughout every stage 
of his calculations new quantities may appear, which may, 
or may not, affect the result. A man may sit down and cal- 
culate the law of some branch of industry ; he may tabulate 



276 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

laboriously the data of a certain place or time where the rule 
of competition was almost paramount, and then deduce an 
approximate result in relation to these data. The tone of 
civilisation, we may suppose, is changed ; a new set of ideas, 
habits, and principles is introduced (matters wholly beyond 
the range of the economist) — the law altogether vanishes. 
When this change occurs, why it occurs, what is its result, 
are questions to which the economist has no clue whatever. 
Yet without it his reasoning is a mere exercise in logic. To 
give it scientific truth or practical value he must have some 
general conceptions about the unknown quantities — re- 
ligious, moral, social ideals — about the other motives of 
human character and forms of human life. In short, he 
must be guided by reference to civilisation as a whole. In 
other words, economic researches have neither use nor reality, 
save as they are guided by social philosophy. 

II 

This brings us to the objections which Mr. Mill has urged 
to the strictures of Comte upon political economy. He in- 
sists that economic studies can be perfectly well carried on 
separately ; that science has been largely aided by indepen- 
dent investigations into a particular class of phenomena, and 
by abstract reasoning about a special order of conceptions. 
He quotes, with approval, M. Littre's (or rather M. Comte's) 
admirable analogy of the industrial phenomena of society to 
the nutritive functions in biology. He tells us that as the 
science of life has been largely promoted by the study of 
nutrition, hypothetically conceived as independent, so the 
science of society may be greatly advanced by the study of 
production conceived in the abstract apart. Now, without 
defending the attacks of Comte upon economists in general 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 277 

(attacks founded on social rather than intellectual grounds, 
on their popular influence rather than their logical errors), 
the answer of the disciples of Comte would be something of 
this kind: Economic researches may to a great extent be 
carried on independently, but only as a branch of social 
philosophy, and therefore not by mere economists. 

So far as a general theory of society requires the laws of 
production to be analysed apart, so far the economic laws 
are a separate branch of thought. What positivism would 
condemn would be, that mere statisticians, without any fixed 
notion of social laws, and without any reference to their 
paramount effect, should create a body of isolated generalisa- 
tions. Comte never condemned the use of abstract methods 
and sustained hypotheses in investigating the laws of produc- 
tion by themselves — on the contrary, he largely uses these 
methods himself; but he would insist that it should be done 
as a branch of the superior science of society. If economists 
were not all actually social philosophers, the least that would 
be required of them would be a very clear and strict notion 
of the limits, the relativity, and the subordination of their 
study. 

The analogy of M. Littre* is beautifully just. Unques- 
tionably the nutritive functions can be investigated separately 
in biology; but only by a biologist, and only as bearing on 
the science of biology. What would happen if nutrition were 
to be dealt with by men wholly ignorant of the other functions 
of life, who hardly believed that they were capable of scien- 
tific treatment? Precisely what has happened when statis- 
ticians attempted to solve the problems of production. When 
biology was struggling into life as a science, there were just 
such a set of specialists, and the chemical theory of nutrition 
was the result. The views of the pure economist are pre- 
cisely such a chemical explanation of the nutrition of society. 



278 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Conceive a science of the Stomach ! And a science of the 
stomach created by men who rather doubted whether there 
was such a thing as a nervous system, men who had vague 
ideas about the circulation of the blood ! The theory of 
digestion can be roughly sketched without much reference 
to the general system of life ; so can the theory of production 
be sketched apart from the general social conditions. The 
chemical and mechanical processes in digestion may be 
analysed and reduced to a system ; as may also their chemical 
and mechanical results. They can be even reproduced and 
imitated partially. 

The laws of production can likewise be systematised so far 
as they depend on the simple rule of competition, and their 
results may be systematised so far as this rule can be supposed 
universal. But this economic theory is not the true theory of 
production any more than the chemical is the true theory of 
digestion. Digestion never in the living frame takes place 
in purely chemical ways, and production never in the living 
society takes place under the sovereign rule of Competition. 
A theory of digestion and of nutrition we may have, but only 
when the theories of the nervous, the vascular, and the 
glandular systems are complete; only from men who can 
grasp and trace the complex combination of all in compound 
processes; who have watched the action of nerves on secre- 
tions, of blood on nerves, of gases upon blood; who know 
how fibre is added to fibre, how laminae of bone are deposited 
around their centres ; who can conceive the living organism ; 
who know life as a whole. 

Once, in the infancy of thought, men poring over a few 
dry bones may have fancied they could build up out of them 
at least a theory of the skeleton by itself. They little thought 
that no rational osteology could exist until a theory of the 
blood had been mechanically, chemically, and biologically 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 279 

established. So too, men, in some charnel houses of society, 
have built up out of the dry bones of the social organism a 
crude theory of production on the mechanical basis of Com- 
petition. A true theory of production we may have one day ; 
but only on the completion of the various constituents of the 
social science ; when the play of human motives and the order 
of the human instincts is definitely solved; when the Social 
Organism is known as a whole, and is felt to have a single 
and intelligible life. 

Mr. Mill's great work itself is a cardinal proof that if the 
facts of production can be separately analysed, it must be 
by the guidance and aid of a social philosophy. He is not 
an economist, but a social philosopher; and his Political 
Economy is simply a branch of his general system of Society. 
A large portion of his treatise is occupied with reasonings 
which are strictly political; and there are no portions more 
impressive than those which are strictly moral. His views 
rest upon doctrines respecting human character and institu- 
tions which he has systematically expounded in all their 
leading branches. His theory of industry is scarcely con- 
ceivable by one who has not mastered his general theory of 
life. He is far from confining his view to the actual forms of 
industry. Production, as he conceives it, would rest on social 
and moral changes vaster than those which separate the 
Middle Ages from ourselves. 

It is hardly recognised yet how grand a transformation of 
society underlies these apparent economic theories. There 
are two great questions which so pervade all industry that 
there is scarcely an economic problem into which they do not 
vitally enter. These are Population and Immovable Prop- 
erty. How far do economists and the public adopt the theo- 
ries of Mr. Mill on Reproductive Abstinence ? Yet it lies at 
the root of all his doctrines on Industry. What economist 



280 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

and what politician accepts his view that landed property 
in England is far from fulfilling the conditions which render 
its existence economically justifiable, and that in Ireland it 
does not do so at all ? Yet the value of a great part of his 
industrial laws depends on this, which rests on an axiom in 
the general theory of social life. Mr. Mill's speculations on 
population and landed property are important chiefly be- 
cause they rest on profound moral and social truths. But 
what would be the value of the speculations of a mere statis- 
tician who had no such guide and no such preparation? 
And who among statisticians has? 

There exists an entire literature on the subject of popula- 
tion, from which moral causes are as effectually excluded as 
if Man were a form of aphis. But moral causes are almost 
decisive in questions of population. Theoretically, the popu- 
lation of the world in a few generations of unlimited breeding 
could stretch from the earth to the moon. Theoretically, if 
the human race was in the religious condition of St. Bernard, 
it might cease with the actual generation. Every variation 
in population between these scarcely conceivable limits is 
due to moral, political, and social circumstances, and in a 
very minor degree to physical. Yet these variations are our 
important data. The effect of population is the one cardinal 
quantity in every economic problem. What then is the ra- 
tionality of economic problems without a general theory of 
population? But a theory of population is essentially a 
domestic question. It is vitally a question about Family. 
The form of marriage, the position of women, the moral 
duties of the pair, purity, continence, are certainly the primary 
theories to be established. Without these, theories of popu- 
lation may be constructed in the abstract; but they cannot 
have much practical utility. Theories of locomotion might 
be constructed in the abstract; but they would not carry us 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 28 1 

far if the theorist paid no attention to the fact that the medium 
of motion might be either earth, air, or water. 

Few economic problems have been more debated, or are 
more important, than that of the cultivation of land. The 
systems of peasant proprietors, of landlords, of farmers, of 
metayers, of cottiers, form a singular instance of a ground 
where economists contradict each other not only in their 
conclusions, but as to the facts from which they reason. But 
there is a question which underlies the whole problem, which 
is the social ground of property and the appropriation of land. 
No one does, no one can treat this fundamental political 
principle as a purely economic question. The first thing a 
rational philosophy has to do is to establish the basis of 
Property ; the rights, the duties, the relations of proprietors ; 
the political, social, and moral functions which ownership in 
land implies. Before this is done, or at least unless this is 
done also, what is the use of the mere economic side of the 
question ? It is, as we have said, the mere digestive side of 
an organic problem of health. Economists have pretty well 
proved that a very good cultivation is attainable economically 
under any of the land systems. They recommend one rather 
than another for political, social, and moral reasons. A large 
portion of Mr. Mill's treatise, at any rate, is thus occupied. 
But it would not be of the slightest value unless he were at 
the same time a profound student of political, social, and 
moral truth. 

When it is said that the rule of competition and self-interest 
is so far practically the rule of modern society as to be a 
sufficient basis for economic laws, it may fairly be asked if 
these two great elements of Population and Property — one 
of them dependent mainly on moral standards, the other on 
political institutions — do not radically affect every problem 
in turn. Every other element of economy may be shown to 



282 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

be largely under the influence of some moral or some social 
force. But the economist excludes these from his enquiries. 
What he does, therefore, is to isolate for study a special class 
of complex phenomena, and then to isolate for his explanation 
of them a special class of the conditions on which they depend. 
The relative force of the other phenomena, and that of the 
other conditions of all the phenomena, remain all the time 
variable but unknown. To assume that they are fixed, to 
assume them of a certain force, to assume them to be small, 
is simply to assume the problems which lie at the root of 
human society. The economist has not only a special class 
of facts to deal with, but he has to refer these to a special class 
of causes. An astronomer might find it convenient to work 
out the law of the centrifugal tendency of the earth; but a 
mere calculator could do nothing of the kind. And assuredly 
the astronomer would not do so unless the centripetal ten- 
dency were a known or certainly a fixed force. 

When, therefore, the economist lays down a law respecting 
wages, for instance, based on modern civilisation and com- 
petition, or on anything but laws of human character and 
society, what he does comes to this : He states a proposition 
about human action which can only apply to states of society 
with habits and institutions exactly like that before him, and 
which would be true of that particular state of society if man- 
kind acted upon certain special motives, which they never 
exclusively do. Truly a somewhat conditional and hypo- 
thetical law! Very useful possibly to the social enquirer, 
but of small value to the man of business. A powerful and 
universal moral stimulus might, it is conceivable, dispose 
all capitalists to give just the same labour and care to their 
business as they do, and yet consume of the profits no more 
than a common labourer. They could then, if they pleased, 
increase the wages of labour largely, population under moral 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 283 

restraint not increasing. A powerful and universal political 
stimulus might also dispose all labourers to force them to do 
so, and, in fact, make the capitalists the serfs of the labourers. 
In either of these cases, and they may be approached in in- 
finite degrees, the law of wages would cease to apply. Xor 
can the economist give us the slightest test as to when this 
tendency might begin, what would cause it, what could stop 
it — whether it is good or bad, whether it is general or partial. 
All that he can give us is the following : — The actual rate of 
wages now and formerly, some of the causes on which they 
depend (value unknown), and what wages would tend to be 
if something happened which never happens. 

It is quite true that there is a certain order of industrial 
questions which are in no degree affected by variation of 
motive. The purely physical analysis of capital, labour, 
production, and accumulation is true of every body of men 
in all ages, of a single family, and of a horde of savages. 
These are the fundamental conditions of all material efforts, 
and are closely dependent on physical truths. These, there- 
fore, are true laws of society. So far political economy is a 
branch of an independent and a real science. But no farther. 
Such laws as are wholly free from the influence of moral 
causes can be exactly stated whilst the moral forces are un- 
known. Such laws as refer to subjects which are affected by 
moral causes (the influence of these being unknown or neg- 
lected) can be nothing but hypothetical. But these true laws 
of production are very few and very general. They are 
rather the axioms and conditions of the study than the 
theorems. They occupy in Mr. Mill's treatise only about 
one-third of the first volume. They are of deep interest to 
all who think about society, but they are general philosophic 
analyses, which are of small practical value, and are scarcely 
understood by the public. These are not the economic laws 



284 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

to which men appeal as the true guide of life. The Political 
Economy which really acts upon men's minds is the Economy 
which is concerned with Distribution. It is the laws of Dis- 
tribution which men seek to know and to enforce. But into 
all of these the moral and the social forces, motives, institu- 
tions, habits, invariably enter. To the economist, therefore, 
the laws of Distribution are purely hypothetical, and conse- 
quently have a theoretic but no direct practical value. 

Ill 

We are now in a position to define the limits within which 
political economy can be pursued as an independent study. 
In the first place, so far as physical conditions go, and up to 
the point where moral conditions begin, strict scientific laws 
can be established. These answer exactly to the chemical 
conditions which limit the study of the nutritive functions, 
or the mechanical conditions which govern the laws of gravi- 
tation in physics. But even here it must be remembered that 
the value of these economic laws depends on the truth of the 
physical premises. The economist will be unable even to 
analyse the formation of capital, or the results of labour, or 
the conservation of wealth, unless he have the requisite 
knowledge of physics, of vegetable, of animal life. Directly 
the data of the study become affected by moral conditions, 
the conclusions of the economist as such cease to be scientific 
laws, and are only hypotheses. Whether these hypotheses 
approach reality, whether they can be of the slightest use, 
can only be determined by a systematic study of the moral 
conditions. That is to say, the test of the rationality of these 
speculations is that they be relative to social science. They 
may be carried on independently to any extent which this 
science may require, but they can only be carried on reason- 
ably under its constant guidance. It must be done, as 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 285 

Aristotle would say, &? rj 7To\ltlk7j iroirjcreie /cal 7ro\m/c<w?. 
It is legitimate in the hands of the social philosopher for the 
purposes of social science. 

Under these conditions it is of great importance that these 
speculations should be produced. But being hypotheses, 
they are of no practical application. To pass from true 
abstract laws of society to practical injunctions is the most 
arduous task of the intellect. To pass to them from limited 
hypotheses would be raving madness. Every science uses 
such abstract fictions with advantage; but it never applies 
them to practice. A physiologist might find it desirable -to 
consider the body from the stomachic point of view; to 
throw aside all organs but one, and to conceive the human 
frame as a simple belly. But his labours would have little 
practical use except to a community of Amoebae. In early 
stages of a science these fictions are wonderfully suggestive, 
as were the circular hypotheses of planetary movements, and 
the historical cycles of Vico. In the maturity of a science 
they are powerful instruments of reasoning, as the hypotheses 
of variation in the theory of development. But until the 
other branches of the science are similarly advanced, and the 
rest of the conditions equally understood, their value is alto- 
gether doubtful. To pursue them by themselves is mere 
waste of time; to systematise them apart is pedantry; to 
promulgate them as realities is a crime. The business of 
the specialist is with facts, not with hypotheses. If he thinks 
that good can come from the crude registration of phenom- 
ena, from practising imaginary calculations on fragmentary 
data, let him be careful that no man look on these undigested 
tables as true generalisations; that society be not poisoned 
by mistaking his idle hypotheses for absolute laws. 

There is another condition which it is essential to remem- 
ber. The higher the nature of the subject* the more complex 



286 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

it is. The facts of society are, therefore, more closely inter- 
woven and dependent on each other than any other facts. 
The abstractions which are easy in astronomy are less so in 
chemistry; they become difficult in biology; they are often 
impossible in sociology. The ramifications of society are 
more intricate by far than those of the body, the multiplicity 
more wondrous, the balance of functions more delicate. 
Strange as is the harmony of the physical organism through- 
out every organ and system down to the microscopic cell or 
nerve-fibre — making all one life — it is nothing to the unity 
of the social organism in its infinity, its sympathy, its variety ; 
wherein each individual soul, each individual fibre of each 
soul, takes and gives its share in the common being. 

There is a second consequence. The more complex are 
the phenomena the more they are modifiable. And of all, 
the most modifiable are the social. The variations of society 
in the past seem infinite. They are no less infinite in the 
future. There is no institution and no instinct which has not 
varied vastly in influence, in form, and in relative impor- 
tance. Every variation in each institution and in each in- 
stinct tells upon the whole society. Each variation of the 
whole society tells upon each institution, and each instinct. 
The possible combinations are simply infinite. When, 
therefore, we isolate for study one institution or one instinct, 
or a set of institutions and instincts, in the midst of this com- 
plex variable whole, we are dealing with one combination 
where the possible combinations are countless ; we are work- 
ing out problems with the knowledge of a perturbation in. 
our subject, where the perturbations are known to be infinite 
in number and in force. So a worm might study the influ- 
ence of climate on vegetation ! 

Now it is this amazing interdependence of the social forces 
on each other, and their no less amazing capacity for adapta- 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 287 

tion, which the popular conception of Political Economy 
most completely misconceives. Amidst forces and condi- 
tions infinite, the effect of one on the whole is never para- 
mount. Each force may be stimulated, neutralised, modi- 
fied, to an indefinite extent. Very similar results may follow 
from very different conditions. Almost similar conditions 
may lead to widely different results. The thing has been 
done constantly in politics. In this age, the saturnalia of 
specialists, pedants are continually giving us theories of the 
effect of this or that institution, and show how the welfare 
of nations depends on a representative chamber or a free press 
or adult suffrage. We are getting to feel that the welfare of 
nations depends on a healthy social system which is the sum 
of a multitude of moral and social forces. We have yet to 
learn that the wealth of nations itself depends on a similar 
aggregate. 

It might be possible and useful (in reason) to work out a 
theory of several special instincts. The destructive instinct 
has been in some ages more entirely universal, more domi- 
nant, and more independent perhaps, than any other. There 
have been ages when a man might possibly have thought 
that the business of Destruction was so nearly identical with 
human activity, and the instinct of Destruction so far para- 
mount, that no other was worth considering. We can imag- 
ine a science of Destruction, or the laws by which men did, do, 
and must destroy each other, based on the assumption that 
man acts exclusively on the destructive instinct. This sci- 
ence, its laws and its postulates, would have been more real 
in early Rome or at least in modern Dahomey, than the sci- 
ence of Production on the postulate of the selfish instinct is 
now in Europe. The obvious objection to such speculations 
would be that man had so many other capacities and in- 
stincts besides those of destruction, and that again destruc- 



288 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

tion itself called out so many other capacities and instincts 
beside the destructive, and that all these so crossed and modi- 
fied each other, and made up one human life, depending on 
one human character, that the speculation was utterly chi- 
merical, not to say demoralising. Production is far more 
reasonable than Destruction, and the desire of getting ma- 
terial comfort is, perhaps, superior to that of destroying one's 
fellows ; but the scientific error of singling these out of human 
life and motives is almost as great, and only less debasing. 

Mr. Mill protests against economists being made liable for 
the belief that the facts of production are not in human con- 
trol. No man certainly could think of suggesting that he 
was liable to the charge — he, to whom England largely owes 
the true conception of social laws. To Mr. Mill we owe the 
knowledge that the facts of society are more modifiable than 
any other, and are so precisely in the degree in which we 
know their laws. Nor in any line of his writing is this truth 
forgotten. But it may fairly be asked if economists as a 
body adopt this view ; if any one of them conceives it as con- 
stantly and fully as he does. Unquestionably this is not the 
notion of the public. In newspapers, pamphlets, Parlia- 
ment, and conversation, it is repeated continually in a con- 
fused and uncertain form, that the facts of production and 
accumulation are beyond human control. It is not meant 
by this to point to the limiting conditions of all production, 
but the special modes of distribution. Let these ignorant 
workmen be told, we often hear, that wages and profits de- 
pend on immutable laws, and cannot be varied at the will 
of employer or employed. Wages, profits, population, con- 
sumption, and accumulation, every branch of economy in 
turn, is treated by the public as if fixed by nature in perma- 
nent proportions. 

Within their own vast limits they are variable to any ex- 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 289 

tent. Change the ideas, the moral tone, the habits, and all 
is changed. Yet this degrading fatalism (as false and as 
deadening as Calvinism itself) is seized by a materialist gen- 
eration as an excuse for giving free scope to its greed, just has 
it is seized by Orientals as an excuse for indulging their sloth. 
It may be that Economists as a body have never propagated 
this monstrus paradox; but some of them distinctly have 
fallen into it, and as a body they have stood by and have never 
raised their voices against this general perversion of their 
teaching. If they have not taught it, they have countenanced 
it by silence. Their teaching gave birth to this delusion ; it 
was theirs to dispel it. None of them have done so but 
Mr. Mill and some of his followers, and that because they are 
not mere Economists. 

It may fairly be asked if the fact of an elaborate system of 
economic laws, based on partial data, is not itself a proof 
that whatever they professed, the economist believed very 
little in the voluntary modifiability of society. What is the 
use of a vast body of generalisations based on a special set 
of conditions, where the conditions may vary indefinitely? 
The number of such possible bodies of laws is infinite. 
There may be a million systems of Political Economy besides 
the one we have got, all just as true if we allow their data. 
What is the use of one more than another, unless we suppose 
some one of the sets of conditions permanent? The actual 
economic laws are certainly not true now, never can be true, 
and in the progress of civilisation may become less and less 
true indefinitely. Let it be supposed, however, that they 
bear some relation to an actual state of society. But what 
if the actual state of society changes, what is the good of them 
then ? We should want another set in relation to that change, 
and so on. Every social system might have its own economic 
laws. 



290 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

The Socialists, the Communists, the Mormons, nay, the 
cannibals, not to speak of every social system in history and 
throughout the world, might have its own economic laws. 
The Economists have absolutely no scientific answer to 
Communism. They take one special instinct; Communism 
takes another. Every social state that ever existed, or that 
could exist (and they are infinite), might have its own eco- 
nomic laws appropriate to its conditions. In a religious 
fraternity the postulate would be the love of God, and the 
only Competition would be to get the least wages and the 
least profits. What, then, is the use of an elaborate body 
of deductions, until we have agreed on the conditions from 
which they follow? These deductions, that is to say, the 
economic principles, do not directly affect the conditions — 
that is to say, the social state; but it directly affects them. 
When we have got the social state we want, or at least con- 
ceive it as a whole, then we can build up useful deductions 
from it. To build the deductions on any conditions is to 
assume them more or less permanent. Yet all reasonable 
social enquiry now proceeds on the ground that the social state 
requires much improvement. That which can improve it 
must be something which affects the social state, and this 
Economic deductions do not, or do most superficially. Po- 
litical Economy, therefore, as an elaborate body of practical 
principles, rests on the assumption that the social state is prac- 
tically not capable of improvement. Directly it is improved, 
new Economic principles will be needed. 

A school of thinkers, with an entire literature, and vast 
social and political influence like that of the Political Econo- 
mists, must be held responsible for the social and popular 
results of their teaching. A body of political writers who 
undertook to systematise the laws of government on the as- 
sumption that men crave only for place and power, and who 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 291 

rigidly excluded from their view questions of religion, edu- 
cation, morality, society, and industry — who confined their 
views to the Georgian period of the British constitution, and 
neglected all history, and all the rest of mankind — might 
construct a science of the British constitution, and a num- 
ber of hypothetical laws of politics, including the laws of 
rotten boroughs, of bribery, patronage, and place-hunting; 
they might give us calculations of the bribes that must be 
given and the jobs which must be perpetrated (hypotheti- 
cally), and how a seat in Parliament depended on the num- 
ber of voters to be purchased compared with the length of the 
candidate's purse. But such men could hardly complain if 
they were accused of lowering rather than elevating political 
morality, of systematising corruption, and reducing venality 
to a science. It is in social and moral affairs that this par- 
tial method of enquiry is so frightfully dangerous. Moral 
systems on narrow bases have constantly depraved an entire 
generation. 

We know the disastrous effects which moral theories of 
the supremacy of the selfish instincts have at times exercised 
on society. Yet Political Economy has, as its postulate, not 
the predominance merely, but the exclusive supremacy, of 
one of the selfish instincts. There was once a very remark- 
able instance. One of the acutest of men, Machiavelli, 
studying one of the corruptest of human societies, once con- 
ceived the idea of reducing politics to a system, on the as- 
sumption that men simply acted for their own interests (the 
very assumption of the economists). He drew up a wonder- 
ful body of generalisations closely related to the special society 
and logically true to his special assumption. His "Prince" 
is a sort of Bible of Political Vice. It was not really true to 
his facts, nor was his assumption literally true, or Italy would 
have realised its poet's "Inferno." But it was sufficiently 



292 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

true to exercise a frightful effect on his contemporaries. 
Nor has it availed him and his apologists to insist that his 
theories entirely rested on an hypothesis which he did nothing 
to recommend; that the assumption was fairly near the 
truth where he wrote; that he was only a political thinker 
analysing the phenomena of society. It has not availed to 
save a man of many noble principles, a martyr to his faith, 
from being a by-word for cynical wickedness. The social 
body, even less than the physical, cannot bear those crucial 
experiments of scientific enquirers. 

IV 

We may now sum up the various conditions which limit 
the study of the facts of Production. The first and the 
radical condition is that it be simply a branch of a general 
system of society. As worked out by a master of the social 
laws — by men like Hume, Adam Smith, and Mr. Mill — 
the study is of great value. But even then it will be marred 
by the failings and the errors of the social theories of which 
it is a part. It cannot be more real or more useful than 
they are. Secondly, that portion of its doctrines which de- 
pends not on human motives but material conditions (the 
laws which govern the production of a soap bubble as much 
as a steamship) may be taken to be true really and always, so 
far as the material data are scientifically right. All that 
portion into which human motives enter is real only so far 
as the whole range of motives is studied; and inasmuch as 
the whole body of other human acts is omitted, is real only 
relatively to them. In this portion, the bulk of ordinary 
economy, there is but one rational predicate — "is." But 
such words as "ought" "must" "will be" never can appear 
in its formulae. Thirdly, its doctrines are purely provisional 
and ephemeral. Its data being the forms of our immediate 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 293 

civilisation, it has no bearing beyond it. It has no historical 
truth, and therefore no future value. It had no meaning in 
the thirteenth century ; and may have none in the twentieth. 
Fourthly, the application of these formulae to life, from the 
fact that it neglects time — and in most relations of life time 
is all-important — and from the extreme complication of the 
subject, is of all intellectual tasks the most difficult and hazard- 
ous. To navigate an ocean with a knowledge of one wind 
or one current alone is nothing to it. It may lure a nation to 
ruin, and demoralise it in the process. 

It being understood that these generalisations never have 
absolute truth, and rarely practical value, we may add some 
tests that these limits are observed. The more systematic 
and complete are the social principles on which they rest, 
the more valuable and sound will be the economic deduc- 
tions. They grow less and less so, the less this subordina- 
tion is recognised. The more the economic generalisations 
are correct historically, the more likely it is that they conform 
to human nature. What is true of all societies and times, is 
probably true altogether. The more the special economic 
facts are independent of general institutions and habits, the 
more easy they are to be isolated and calculated. The more 
they depend on special motives, the more accurate will be 
the analysis. The more temporary the human relation or 
effort they involve, the easier they are to explain. The more 
they depend on special and highly artificial processes, the 
more independent and accurate the laws. Prices in mar- 
ket overt, currency, bills of exchange, monetary practices, 
insurance, restrictions on trade, taxation, form subjects more 
or less capable of accurate generalisation and very valuable 
principles. Man as a responsible moral being, human life 
as a whole, is less directly affected. But wages, profits, 
accumulation, consumption, population, poor-laws, land- 



294 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

systems, partnership, tenancy, trade-unions, co-operation, — 
these are things which involve the great human instincts, 
wants, and institutions ; and they are for the most part beyond 
the reach of a mere economist. He can deal with the shell, 
not with the kernel of life, for of permanent human relations 
and forces he knows nothing. But what does this list of 
tests show but this ? — that with the trivial forms of existence 
Economy can do something ; with the greater, nothing — 
that it can only deal with these as it widens into Social 
Philosophy. 

No doubt the bulk of the ordinary economists have a sort 
of social philosophy, a general theory of society. But it 
is one which they very loosely conceive ; and would be quite 
unable to prove. It is certainly one which the public who 
follow them, in its naked form most sternly reject. Most 
of them are more or less conscious adherents of that perverse 
phase of Benthamism which places the roots of morality 
in the selfish instincts, and the basis of society on absolute 
non-interference. With the moral doctrine of self-interest 
and the political doctrine of laissez-faire (vaguely understood) 
the pure statistician thinks himself prepared for investigating 
production. 

But the authors of these principles were not specialists. 
Their theories of self-interest and individualism were based 
on systematic education, on thorough moral training, on 
entire social reconstruction. To leave all these to take care 
of themselves is to seize on the mischievous side of their 
doctrines alone. To Bentham self-interest meant a very 
cultivated sense of duty; to the economist it means a gross 
personal appetite. He said, Let government cease to force, 
so that men may be educated to justice. The economist 
protests against interference, so that the instinct of gain be 
unchecked. If his general principles are right, they remain 



LIMITS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 295 

to be proved. That they be true, that they be complete, 
that they be systematic, is all essential. They are what 
physiology is to the physician, what a creed is to the priest. 
If these moral and social problems yet await a decision, they 
must be judged in themselves, not insinuated in a body of 
practical rules of life. In the meantime it is intolerable 
that in the innocent form of a scheme for increasing our 
comfort, society should be saturated with principles which 
philosophy condemns as radically false, and the moral sense 
rejects as profoundly degrading. 

Is it that no social philosophy is needed? Is it that we 
need only to know how to produce more — not how to produce 
in a more human way ? Does industry need no correcting, 
purifying, guiding? Are there not things in it which make 
feeble souls look on material progress as a curse? Are 
there not quarters in our big cities where two children die 
in place of one — twenty thousand, where ten thousand 
might have been saved; where sucking infants are drugged 
with opium, and farmed at nurse by a hag by the score; 
where amidst arsenic and brimstone fumes the jaws fall 
out, the bones rot off, lungs choke, and youths and girls 
die faster than in Mississippian swamp? Are there no 
"works" reeking with cruel blots, where toil is endless, 
foul, and crushing, — where the rich man's luxuries are 
elaborated by disease and death, — where unsexed men 
and women live the lives of swine, — where children are 
worn, maimed, poisoned as in a limbus infantium, — 
stunted in soul and limb, polluted and polluting? Are 
there not trades where the safeguards against death are 
forbidden, that lives may fall and wages rise? Are not 
each year one thousand lives lost in coal mines, " chiefly 
from preventible causes"? Are there not our million or 
so of paupers whom neglect leaves sometimes to fester to 



296 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

death, — sometimes to die in parturition ? Are there not 
gangs of women and children driven from farm to farm by 
an actual slave-driver? Is there not our rural labourer, 
the portent of England, without hope or energy; plodding 
wearily through life like his ox? 

And where such abominations are not, is there not amidst 
the healthier forms of labour a deep class feud, and spirit 
of strife, sweeping across our modern industry, as the plagues 
and famines of the later Middle Ages swept over Europe, — 
gigantic outrages and strikes, shaking the fabric of society, 
and threatening its very institutions ; on the one side a wild 
sense of wrong, on the other a raging desire to be rich? 
These are the evils we see, and for which we need a remedy ; 
evils of moral, social kinds, coming out of rotten systems 
of life and ungovernable passions. And they tell us that 
the cure is to be found in a knowledge of Political Economy 
— in the study of hypothetical laws, which would be true if 
all men followed their selfish instincts. 

We need indeed a social philosophy. If one instinct can 
be reduced to a method, others can. If one form of activity 
can be systematised, all the forms and life itself can. Where 
are the laws of Production on the hypothesis of Duty? 
Where are the principles of morality and sociality: of good- 
feeling, of equity, of protection, of good faith, of self-denial, 
as applied to Industry? Where is the science of popular 
education? If there be a science of the Acquisitive instinct, 
we need one much more of the Protecting instinct. If these 
have not been done, it is because so great a part of modern 
intellect and study has been absorbed in analysing one 
phase of life and one instinct of the soul — a phase the most 
obvious to specialise, an instinct the most dangerous to 
isolate. 



II 

TRADES-UNIONISM 

(1865) 

The following is part of an article published in the second 
volume of the Fortnightly Review under the editorship 
of Mr. George H. Lewes. 

After the great lock-out in the Building Trades of 
1862, the writer had been in close relations with the 
secretaries and committees of the chief Unions. He had 
also often visited the Unions at Leeds, Manchester, Brad- 
ford, Halifax, Rochdale, Sheffield, and Nottingham. 
During the Cotton Famine, together with the late Sir 
Godfrey Lushington, he conducted a personal enquiry 
into the condition of the Lancashire operatives' societies 
of all kinds. He had also written much in the Bee 
Hive, and other workmen's organs, and afterwards in 
the Pall Mall Gazette. 

Although this sketch of trades-unionism is now more 
than forty years old, as it was founded on personal 
knowledge of the societies and on intimacy with many 
of their managers, there is no reason to change, or even 
to qualify, the principles here insisted upon — prin- 
ciples which the whole evidence laid before the Trades- 
union Commission of 1867-9 amply justified — and 
which have since been adopted by the legislature (1908). 
297 



298 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Of the features of our industrial system, none is more im- 
portant to study than that most significant fact — the insti- 
tution, growth, and power of trades-unionism. It is in 
reality the practical solution of all labour questions, to which 
the labouring classes cling. Right or wrong, it is their 
panacea. It is in many ways by far the most powerful 
element of our industrial system that has been yet organised 
into an institution. It thus goes to the very root of the most 
vital movements of society. It is not too much to say that 
the whole political, practical, and organising energies of the 
working class are now thrown into it. If reform bills lan- 
guish, and agitation lingers to awake, it is because they are 
absorbed in industrial rather than political leagues. No 
one can suppose that the existing dead calm and indecision in 
the political sphere really represents the practical instinct 
and energy of Englishmen. It is not so. Our real public 
movements and struggles are industrial. In them powers 
of will and sympathy are being exerted as keen as ever thrilled 
in our hottest political convulsions. Of this movement the 
heart and centre — the club-life — the associative, initiative, 
and reserve force, is unionism — a force, on the whole, of 
which the public should know the whole truth — and nothing 
but the truth. 

I. The first thing is to recognise the extent and impor- 
tance of the movement itself. For all general purposes the 
unions can count upon the support and contributions of 
at least an equal number of the workmen who are not regular 
members of the society. Their " war-footing," it may be said, 
is about double that of their peace establishment. For all 
practical purposes, therefore, the unions may be taken to 
represent the available strength of the whole skilled body 
of artisans. Nor are these recent or precarious associations. 



TRADES-UNIONISM 



299 



Most of them have steadily increased in numbers, income, 
and extent for the last ten or fifteen years. Trades in which 
the most obstinate struggles have taken place — the engi- 
neers, the colliers, the cotton-spinners, the building trades 
— still show the unions far larger and more flourishing than 
before. Any one who will take the trouble to collect and 
examine the latest trade circulars of the principal societies 
will see the record of their progress. Increased numbers, 
wider area, and larger funds are shown from year to year. 
Everywhere organisation, consolidation, and regularity ex- 
tend. Englishmen, who never mistake the signs of commer- 
cial success, can hardly fail to see that there must be some- 
thing at bottom to make these live; and men who know 
how to estimate political forces will recognise the strength 
of an institution that has an organisation to which no politi- 
cal association in the kingdom can distantly aspire. 

In the face of facts like these, it does seem strange that 
sensible men, and even sensible employers, should continue 
to talk of unions as nests of misery, folly, and ruin. Men 
who have to deal with these powerful associations themselves 
can bring themselves to speak of them as "cancers to be 
cut out," as "diseases," and "madness" to be cured, and 
even suggest an Act of Parliament to suppress all associa- 
tions whatever. It is like the Vatican raving at newspapers 
and railways. Such an Act of Parliament would be simply 
a social revolution. It would be as easy to eradicate the 
"cancer" of unionism as it would to eradicate the "cancer" 
of public meetings, or the "disease" of a free press. The 
fact that the flower of our artisan population are staunch 
unionists, does not prove that unions are beneficial. But 
it would be more reasonable if the public, and certainly if 
employers, would think it proved them to be not quite pes- 
tilent and suicidal. They are, from the mere fact of their 



300 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

importance, entitled to respect. No rational man can think 
that the working-men of this country are likely to be found 
year after year more and more devoted to any system, if 
it were no less ruinous to themselves than vicious in prin- 
ciple. Unionism, right or wrong, is the grand movement in 
which the working classes have their heart. Men of sense 
will recognise this fact, and deal with it accordingly. It is 
the prevalence of mis judgments like these which make these 
trade struggles so obstinate; and perhaps it is that which 
makes them so common. 

There is a still worse form of misconception prevalent, 
which amounts sometimes to personal calumny. It is still 
the fashion to repeat that unions and strikes are uniformly 
the work of interested agitators. These men, in the stereo- 
typed phrase, are supposed to drive their misguided victims 
like sheep. We hear from time to time employers giving 
us this account of the matter in apparent good faith; just 
as the Austrians always thought the Italian movement was 
the work of Mazzini. Now if there is one feature of union- 
ism which is more singular than another it is the scrupulous 
care with which it maintains the principles of democratic 
and representative government. It would be difficult to 
find a single trade society in England in which any official 
or any board of managers could take any important step, 
or, what is the same thing, deal with the common funds 
without a regular written vote from their constituents. Those 
who talk of the action of a trade-union as if it were a body 
of Carbonari, must be entirely ignorant of the elaborate 
machinery by which a union is worked. Before any im- 
portant step, much less before a general strike is determined 
on, regular voting papers are sent round to every member 
of the society; the step is discussed night after night in 
every separate lodge; if the subject requires it, delegates 



TRADES-UNIONISM 3OI 

are chosen from each lodge; conferences are constantly 
held, often followed by fresh appeals to the constituencies; 
the discussions often last six months, and are practically 
public; the result is at length ascertained by a simple com- 
parison of votes, and is often one which the secretaries and 
managers have no means whatever of influencing or even 
foreseeing. 

In fact the vote on an important question of one of the 
large amalgamated societies scattered over the country, 
the separate lodges of which discuss the subject under very 
different conditions, and the body of which the secretaries 
have no means whatever of addressing or meeting, is the 
purest type of democratic representation of opinion. The 
subject is one which usually touches each voter, his comfort, 
his family, and his future, in the most vital manner ; it relates 
to matters with which he is perfectly familiar; he is not 
accessible to personal appeal, nor, except in a very small 
degree, to written addresses from any central authority; 
it is one which he has to discuss with a small number of 
his fellows, and on which he has to vote with a very large 
number, but without communication ; the ordinary machinery 
of canvassing, excitement, and party agitation is simply 
impossible ; and the result is one which it is out of the ques- 
tion to predict. It is a species of pure democratic united 
with true representative government. The members indi- 
vidually vote as in an ancient republic, but generally with 
the assistance and counsel of special representative assem- 
blies, and invariably in separate and independent groups. 
If any system ever yet devised makes a dictator or a dema- 
gogue impossible, it is this. Its great defect is its cumbrous- 
ness and want of concentration. But of all others it is the 
way to bring out the deliberate opinion of every individual 
member. It is this — not infatuation — which makes a 



302 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

deliberate strike so obstinate. There is no political institu- 
tion in this country which carries self-government to any- 
thing like the same pitch. And, what should not be for- 
gotten, it is a system which has already given the whole class 
a very high degree of political education. 

As to the managers of these associations they are invariably 
elected periodically by the same general suffrage. They are 
almost invariably simple members of the body themselves, 
and their salaries scarcely exceed their ordinary wages. 
So far as the personal knowledge of the writer goes (and it 
is not inconsiderable), they are usually honest, sensible men 
of business, sometimes strikingly deficient in the art of expres- 
sion, and the powers of party agitators. The men who 
direct a strike have usually been at their work until its com- 
mencement, and would usually return to it at its close, were 
it not that they are too often chased out of their trade by 
all the employers in concert. 

The present writer, who has for years known intimately 
the managers of very many societies, cannot refrain from 
bearing his witness that amongst them are to be found men 
as upright, enlightened, and honourable as any in the com- 
munity; that the influence they possess is almost always 
the result of tried ability and character; and the instances 
of such men living out of their followers' necessities are 
extremely rare. For the most part they go through hard 
clerks' routine of accounts and reports, under a good deal 
of persecution from the employers, and are not seldom the 
most conservative and peaceful counsellors in the whole 
society. The union is frequently able to suppress the ten- 
dency to indiscriminate strikes. It is, indeed, notorious 
that the faults into which the leaders of the established unions 
are apt to fall are routine and excess of caution. I have 
myself seen a circular issued by the council of an amalga- 



TRADES-UNIONISM 



303 



mated society to warn the members against the disposition 
to strike for which a sudden improvement of trade had given 
great facilities. The larger and more established the unions 
become, the fewer causes of struggle arise. And there 
would be no greater security for the employer and the public 
than that the societies should be stronger, and their leaders 
more trusted. 

II. Next to the character of these societies and their 
leaders being fairly judged, it is very desirable that the truth 
be ascertained as to the success or non-success of strikes. 
It used to be frequently said, and it has been repeated occa- 
sionally by employers, that strikes never succeed. It is 
only the other day that the newspapers informed us of a 
very important strike which did result in a great increase 
of wages. The carpenters of London, a body numbering 
from 10,000 to 15,000, the majority of whom are in union, 
demanded, and after a strike of some weeks, defeating a 
threatened lock-out, succeeded in obtaining, an advance 
of wages of about 10 per cent. This advance is now being 
given to the other building trades, and will soon be general. 
No one doubts that this rise is permanent, and will never 
be reduced. There is here an undoubted instance of a 
body numbering nearly 40,000 men obtaining a large and 
permanent rise of wages by means of a strike. How this 
is economically possible had better be answered by those 
economists who first invent industrial laws, and then invent 
facts to fit them. 

The statement, indeed, is so contrary to the experience 
of every one who has been able to look at the question from 
an independent point, and over a wide area, that there is 
overwhelming proof that it is entirely erroneous. Any one 
who will search the files of a working-class organ will find 



304 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

accurate reports of countless successful strikes over every 
part of England. The present writer has in his possession 
a list of the successful strikes for one single trade in one 
year. This list contains more than eighty instances in 
which one union in that period had by actual or threatened 
strikes obtained increased wages, or, what is the same thing, 
shorter hours. 

The sums which are absurdly calculated as "lost" in a 
strike are usually not lost at all, but only retained. No 
doubt, in every prolonged strike a good deal is lost, but it 
is chiefly in interest upon fixed capital. To calculate all 
the sums which might have been spent in wages as "lost" 
or "wasted" is simply puerile. The wages fund, in the 
language of economists, is the sum which the capitalist 
devotes to the payment of wages; and since in a general 
strike or lock-out the owners of vast and costly factories 
cannot employ the fund (except temporarily) in any other 
way, and their customers have to wait for their goods, sooner 
or later the wages fund, or most of it, is paid to the workmen 
in the trade. Whether it comes to them regularly or spas- 
modically signifies a great deal to the well-being of the recipi- 
ents; but in the long run they get the gross sum, though 
somewhat discounted. General and even partial strikes 
are usually preceded and succeeded by extra production 
and labour, which nearly equalise the rate for the whole 
period. Very many lock-outs are simply a mode of stopping 
production during a stagnant state of trade, and are occa- 
sionally only a device of some of the more powerful employers 
to force their own body to cease production, whilst they are 
waiting or manoeuvring for a rise of price. During a strike 
both masters and men reduce all expenditure to a minimum, 
which by itself is an obvious saving. And there are many 
strikes and lock-outs in which the actual loss from various 



TRADES-UNIONISM 



305 



causes is a trifle, or where it would be inevitable from other 
causes. But in any case, to calculate the deferred expendi- 
ture of wages as "loss" is a sophistical use of terms. The 
employer in a strike suffers the loss of interest on fixed capital 
and of his profit (a loss which is often from other reasons 
inevitable); the workman suffers a loss of comfort which 
is often compensated by the discipline it enforces. The 
real loss is the loss of common interest and good feeling; 
but the supposed loss of wages rests generally on a mere 
juggle of words. 

A careful investigation of the subject in such records as 
are constantly published, totally dispels the prevalent idea 
that unions and strikes have no object but that of raising 
wages, and in that object they invariably meet a "miserable 
monotony of defeat." 

Strikes, of course, frequently fail. But a careful com- 
parison will show the following results : — 

1. Strikes to obtain a rise of wages or a reduction of 
hours usually succeed. 

2. Strikes to resist a reduction of wages usually fail. 

3. Strikes to enforce trade rules or to suppress objection- 
able practices usually fail in appearance and succeed in 
reality. 

4. Lock-outs to crush unions invariably fail. 

III. After that of general protection against abuses and 
against overtime, one of the chief and the most useful func- 
tions of unionism is to resist the tendency to continual fluc- 
tuations in wages. At first sight nothing seems more natural 
than that wages should vary with the price of the product. 
The principal objection, however, against the sliding scale 
of wages and prices is that it associates the workmen directly 
with the gambling vicissitudes of the market. To do this 



306 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

is to destroy one of the benefits of civilisation and the social 
justification of large capitals. It is of vital interest to society 
that the actual labourer should have a regular and not a 
fluctuating means of subsistence. As he can save but little, 
he has no reserve to stand sudden changes; and sudden 
loss or stoppage of his wages means moral and physical 
degradation to him. He has not the education or the means 
of foreseeing, much less of providing against, the wider 
influences of the market. The great gains and the great 
losses naturally should fall to the share of the capitalist 
alone. 

He and his order can act on the state of the market, and 
are bound to watch and know its movements. Society is 
bound to protect them only on condition that they perform 
this function satisfactorily. But to let every little vicissi- 
tude of the market fall directly on the mere labourer, who 
knows nothing about it, and cannot affect it if he did, is 
simply barbarism. In such a state of things the capitalist 
abdicates his real post and becomes a mere job-master or 
ganger. He associates his helpless workmen in every specu- 
lative adventure. He leaves them to bear the effects of a 
glut which his recklessness may have caused, or of a foreign 
war which his prudence might have foreseen. Every fall 
in the price of wares, fluctuating as this is from a compli- 
cation of accidents, mulcts the labourer suddenly of ten, 
twelve, or fifteen per cent of his living. How many middle- 
class families could stand this every quarter? To the 
labourer, who has no reserve, no credit, and no funded 
income, and who by the necessity of the case lives from 
week to week and from hand to mouth, it means the sacri- 
fice of his comforts, of his children's education, of his honest 
efforts. There was truth, though it may be not very fully 
expressed, in the words of the old puddler at the recent 



TRADES-UNIONISM 307 

conference : "He knew no reason why working-men's wages 
were to be pulled to pieces to suit the foreign markets." 
Capital, in fact, would become a social nuisance if it could 
only make the labourer a blind co-speculator in its adven- 
tures. 

It is far from the writer's meaning to deny that wages 
must in the long run be accommodated to profits. From 
year to year, or over longer periods, wages will gradually 
find their level. But it is a totally different thing that they 
should fluctuate with all the erratic movements incident 
to every market price-list. A merchant will not give to 
his accountants more than the average salaries of his busi- 
ness. • He does not, however, walk into his counting-house, 
and tell his clerks that, having lost a ship which he forgot 
to insure, he reduces their salaries ten per cent. The wages 
of all the superior trades are, or might be, nearly stationary 
for long periods together. The engineers, who form a 
branch of the iron trade, subject to amazing fluctuations, 
have been paid at the same rates now invariably for more 
than ten years. So till the rise of the last few months had 
the London builders. Of course the men, to do this, must 
have foregone every temporary or partial rise. For their 
true good these sudden advances in wages do them more 
real harm even than sudden reduction. Acting on this 
principle the trades just mentioned, and most of the leading 
trades, have maintained an unvarying rate of wages, as well 
as suppressed those spasmodic seasons of excessive produc- 
tion and sudden cessation which form the glory of the race 
of industrial conquerors. But to do this the workmen must 
have a union capable of putting them on an equality with 
capital. 

As it is this interference with what is called Free Trade 
which is the main charge against unionism, it is important 



308 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

to examine this question in detail. It is often asked why 
cannot the fifty shillings' worth of puddling be bought in 
the same manner as fifty shillings' worth of pig-iron ? Well, 
one thing is, that the pig-iron can wait till next week or next 
month. It is in no immediate hurry. But the fifty shil- 
lings' worth of puddling cannot wait, even a few days. The 
" human machine" in question is liable to the fatal defect 
of dying. Nor is it in all the relations of life that "each 
man is free to bargain for himself." It is curious in how 
many sides of our existence this liberty is curtailed. If one 
wants £1000 worth of horse, one can go to Tattersall's and 
buy it without question. But if one wants £1000 worth of 
wife, there will be a good many questions asked, and a good 
many people to consult. The lady's relations even may 
wish to say something ; there may be all sorts of stipulations, 
to say nothing of settlements. A man cannot buy a place 
in a partnership exactly in open market. He cannot go 
to a physician or a lawyer or a priest and haggle about the fee. 
Wherever there are close or permanent human relations, 
between one man and many, an understanding with all 
jointly is the regular course. Every partnership of labour, 
all co-operation to effect anything in common, involves this 
mutual agreement between all. It is because employers 
fail to see that manufacture is only the combined labour of 
many of which they are the managers, that they regard the 
whole concern, stock, plant, and "hands," as raw material, 
to be bought and sold. The iron-master who buys pig- 
iron is not entering into permanent relations with it, or 
even with its possessor. It cannot work with him, obey 
him, trust him. The "human machine," however, is a 
very surprising engine. It has a multitude of wants, a 
variety of feelings, and is capable of numerous human im- 
pulses which are commonly called human nature. An 



TRADES-UNIONISM 309 

iron-master cannot buy in open market fifty shillings' worth 
of puddling, because he does not want fifty shillings' worth 
of puddling. It would be of no good to him if he had it. 
He wants a man who will work, not his fifty shillings' worth 
of puddling, but day by day and year by year; who will 
work when he is not himself overlooking him; who will 
work intelligently, and not ruin his machinery and waste 
his stuff; who will not cheat him, or rob him, or murder 
him ; who will work as a chance hireling will not and cannot 
work; who will trust him to act fairly, and feel pride in 
his work, and in the place. 

If he cannot get men like these he knows that he will be 
ruined and undersold by those who can. He knows that 
fifty shillings' worth of black slave would not help him, nor 
fifty shillings' worth of steam engine. Do what he will, 
perfect machinery to a miracle, still the manufacturer must 
ultimately depend on the co-operation of human brains 
and hearts. No " human machinery" will serve his end. 
Can a general in war buy fifty shillings' worth of devoted 
soldiers? Can he make his bargain with each man of his 
army separately? They are too precious to be picked up 
in a moment, and their efficiency lies in their union. If 
the iron-master had to go into the labour market as often 
as he has to go into the iron market, and haggle for every 
day's work as he does for every pig and bar, he would be 
a dead or ruined man in a year. He cannot buy puddling 
as he can buy pigs, because in one word men are not pig- 
iron. Sentiment this, perhaps, but a sentiment which can- 
not be conquered, and produces stern facts. For the fifty 
shillings' worth of puddling by long reflection has discovered 
that to the making of iron goes the enduring, willing, intelli- 
gent labour of many trained men; that it is work which 
is impossible without a permanent combination of will and 



3IO NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

thought, but the produce of which may be unfairly divided 
unless all act with a spirit of mutual defence and protection. 
They see their employers too often forgetting this, the un- 
derlying fact of all industry, and their answer is, Union- 
ism. Sentimental ! emotional economy ! but a fact. When 
pigs and bars of iron exhibit a similar phenomenon, an 
iron-master will buy his fifty shillings' worth of puddling 
as freely as he buys his pigs or his bars, — but not till then. 

IV. It seems almost waste of time, in the face of the prev- 
alent tendency of working-men to unite, to argue that there 
is not the slightest necessity for it. But the fact that with- 
out combination the capitalist has a tremendous advantage 
over the labourer is so important a matter in this discussion, 
that it may be well to examine it further. Now this advan- 
tage arises in at least three ways. In the first place, although 
the workmen altogether are just as necessary to the capi- 
talist as he is to them, yet in a great factory each separate 
workman is of infinitesimal necessity to the proprietor, 
whilst he is of vital necessity to the workman. The employer 
of iooo men can without inconvenience at any moment dis- 
pense with one man or even ten men. The one man, how- 
ever, if he has no means or reserve to find other employ- 
ment, must submit on pain of destitution to himself and his 
family. In the same way, if there were absolutely no con- 
cert or communication between them, the employer could 
easily deal with every one of his thousand hands in succes- 
sion, just as a giant could destroy an army if he could get 
at each man separately. But the moment they agree to 
act together, and to help each other in turn, the bargain is 
equalised; the need which each side has of the other is on 
a par, and the power each has to hold its ground is nearly 
equivalent. 



TRADES- UNIONISM 3 1 1 

In the second place, the kind of need which each has of 
the other is very different. The capitalist needs the labourer 
to make larger profits. A diminution of these, their total 
cessation, and positive loss, is an evil ; but it is an evil which 
most capitalists can very well sustain, and often experience, 
for years at a time. A strike or a lock-out is a blow to a 
capitalist ; but it is like a bad debt or a bad speculation, — 
it is an incident of his trade, allowed for and provided against. 
But to the workman (who would not be a workman if he 
had even a little capital) the stoppage of wages, in the absence 
of any combination or fund, means utter destruction, disease, 
death, and personal degradation, eviction from his house 
and home, the sale of his goods and belongings, the break-up 
of his household, the humiliation of his wife, the ruin of his 
children's bodies and minds. To the capitalist a trade 
struggle is a blot in his balance-sheet. To the workman, 
if isolated and unaided, it means every affliction which the 
imagination can conceive. 

Thirdly, this is a question in which time is all-important. 
To the capitalist weeks or months at most represent pecu- 
niary loss. To the unaided workman weeks often, to say 
nothing of months, are simply starvation for himself and 
his family. Alone, the working-man must take his wages 
down on Saturday night at a fearful discount. If he could 
wait for his money he would get them in full. The Dorset- 
shire labourer, ignorant and hopeless, could get double 
wages in a Northern county — if he could get there. He 
sometimes knows this; but he will not leave his wife and 
children to the death of the grave or the workhouse. If 
all the labourers in England could lie in bed for a month 
during harvest, they might get any wages they liked to ask; 
and a dozen of champagne all round. Wages' questions 
are simply questions of time, and capital means insurance 



312 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

against time. The familiar and recognised analysis of 
labour and capital comes only to this — that capital forms 
the store by which the workmen are supported until the 
joint product can be utilised or exchanged; wages are only 
the portions of this store meted out periodically to the work- 
men whilst they are uniting and labouring. By the very es- 
sence of this arrangement the possessor of this store (and in 
the abstract no man is the possessor of it except by the free 
will of the rest) can wait his own time. The recipients of it 
cannot. To any one who follows out all these considera- 
tions, it may well seem simple pedantry to accumulate argu- 
ments to show that the capitalist and the individual work- 
man are on equal terms. It is obvious to the daily experi- 
ence of all mankind that they are not ; and all the reasoning 
in the world cannot make them to be so. 

There remains, of course, to be noticed the competition 
of the employers. This is the sole reply of the other side to 
all the reasons just mentioned. No doubt the influence of 
this competition is very great — without it the workmen 
would be (what they occasionally are) at the mercy of the 
capitalists. But the question is, whether its influence is so 
great as to counterbalance all else on the other side, and 
establish an equality. Now this competition of the em- 
ployers for the workmen is subject to two very important 
qualifications. The first is that there is a universal and 
irresistible tendency in all employers, which (as Adam Smith 
shows) is much more powerful and efficient in the smaller 
class — capitalists and sellers as against the workmen and 
the public — not to raise wages or lower prices. This is 
the "silent combination," which needs no formal expression 
and generally becomes a point of honour. To such a pitch 
is this carried that, for instance in the iron trade, the asso- 
ciation practically binds its members to fixed prices and 



TRADES-UNIONISM 



313 



wages. So that in this very iron trade this competition of 
the employers for the men does not exist. As a last resort 
the employers will compete against each other for the work- 
men, but they know it is a suicidal measure. It is one which 
their small numbers, superior foresight, and power of hold- 
ing over, makes them able to dispense with except at the last 
pinch. And it is, therefore, but sparingly employed. In all 
North Staffordshire, the scene of the late iron strike, there 
are said to be but six firms, and those are in close combina- 
tion. Is it likely they bid against each other for men? 

There is a second very important qualification, also, 
which neutralises this competition of the capitalists with 
each other. This is the competition of the workmen with 
each other. Just as, if left quite to itself, there may be a 
tendency amongst employers to raise wages by bidding 
against each other for "hands"; so there is as strong, or a 
stronger, tendency amongst the employed to lower wages by 
bidding against each other for employment. Sometimes, if 
markets are very brisk, capital seeks labour ; but more often 
in this country labour seeks capital. With our redundant 
population and our vast reserve of labour-power just strug- 
gling for life — that incubus of destitute and unemployed 
labour which lies so heavily on all efforts of our artisans, 
hungering for their places — the common state of things is 
that of labourers competing for employment. 

At any rate competition is as broad as it is long. What 
the employer loses by it when business is pressing, he gains 
by it when labour is plentiful. And this competition, one so 
fluctuating and vast, is outside any conceivable combination 
or union of the men. Nothing can prevent the dregs or Helot- 
ism of labour from continually underselling it. Surely this 
use of competition in the argument is thoroughly one-eyed. 
We are told that for the workman's protection and relief 



314 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

against low wages, oppression, or sharp practice, there is 
the great compensator, the competitions of the masters. 
They quite overlook the fact that this is at least counterbal- 
anced by the competition of the men. Our case is that the 
individual workman has to struggle incessantly against this 
competition — plus the position, the opportunities, the wait- 
ing and reserve power which his capital gives to the employer. 
Why, it is asked, is the puddler more at the mercy of the 
great capitalist than the farmer is at the mercy of the corn- 
dealer? No doubt every small capitalist is at a great disad- 
vantage in dealing with a very great capitalist. But the dis- 
advantage of the mere day workman in dealing with his 
employer is out of all proportion to this. The seller of all 
wares has a certain stock, a certain reserve power, a capital 
of some kind, which by the conditions of his existence the 
day labourer has not. The former can wait at least for 
some time; he can send his wares from market to market. 
To the mere day worker it is often this market or none — 
this wage or none — lower rates or starvation. Now under 
all this lies the fundamental fallacy which distorts the reason- 
ing of many capitalists and most economists. We come, in 
fact, to the root of the matter. The labourer has not got a 

THING TO SELL. 

The labour market, as it is called by an unhappy figure, 
is in reality totally unlike the produce market. There are 
three grand features in which labour differs from a commodity. 
Firstly, every seller of wares, even a hawker, has by the 
hypothesis a stock, a realised store, a portable visible thing — 
a commodity. If he were in need of immediate support — 
that is, wages — he would not be a seller or trader at all. 
The trader is necessarily relieved of all immediate and cer- 
tainly of all physical pressure of want. The difference here 
between £100 and nothing in infinite. It is so difficult to 



TRADES-UNIONISM 315 

persuade millionaires that the whole human race have not 
got private capitals and sums in the funds. To a large class 
of working-men, however, it is a daily question and need — 
get bread to-morrow, or die. The labourer has nothing to 
fall back upon, and a few lost hours pull him down. 

In the second place, in most cases the seller of a commod- 
ity can send it or carry it about from place to place, and mar- 
ket to market, with perfect ease. He need not be on the spot 
— he generally can send a sample — he usually treats by 
correspondence. A merchant sits in his counting-house, and 
by a few letters and forms transports and distributes the 
subsistence of a whole city from continent to continent. In 
other cases, as the shopkeeper, the ebb and flow of passing 
multitudes supplies the want of locomotion in his wares. 
His customers supply the locomotion for him. This is a 
true market. Here competition acts rapidly, fully, simply, 
and fairly. It is totally otherwise with a day labourer, who 
has no commodity to sell. He must be himself present at 
every market — which means costly personal locomotion. 
He cannot correspond with his employer; he cannot send a 
sample of his strength; nor do employers knock at his cot- 
tage door. This is not a market. There is but one true 
labour market : where the negro slave is (or rather was) 
sold like a horse. But here, as in the horse fair, the bargain 
is not made with the negro or the horse, but with the trader 
who owns them, and who is, strictly speaking, a merchant 
freely on equal terms disposing of a commodity. But if 
the horse or the negro came to sell himself, what sort of 
bargain would he make, starving in the very market? In a 
word, there is no real market, no true sale of a commodity, 
where vendor and wares are one and the same — and that 
one a man — totally without resources or provisions for 
himself — with the wants of a citizen, and a family at home. 



316 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Thirdly (and this is the important point), the labourer has 
not got a commodity to sell, because what he seeks to do is 
not to exchange products, but to combine to produce. When 
buyer and seller meet, in market or out, the price is paid, the 
goods change hands, they part, the contract is complete, 
the transaction ends. Even where, as in complex dealings, 
the bargain is prolonged, it is a dealing in specific goods. It 
is not the formation of a continuous relation which for the 
workman at least absorbs and determines his whole life. If 
the trader fails to do business with one customer, he turns 
to another. The business over, he leaves him, perhaps for 
ever. In any case the contract is a contract for the sale 
(i.e. simple transfer) of one specific thing. How totally 
different is this from the relations of employer and employed. 
This is permanent, or rather continuous — it involves the 
entire existence of one at least — it implies sustained co-opera- 
tion. This is no contract to sell something, it is the contract 
to do something, it is a contract of partnership or joint activ- 
ity, it is an association involving every side of life. The 
workman must live close to his work, his hours must conform 
to it ; the arrangement of his household, his wife's duties and 
occupations, his home in every detail, are wholly dependent 
on the terms and conditions of this work. The person by 
whom he is employed, and certainly the class of employers, 
can affect him for good or evil in the most constant or vital 
manner. His whole comfort, peace, and success — very 
often his health — under the factory system, usually his 
dwelling, are in the hands of this same employer. By a 
series of small arrangements, difficult to follow in detail, 
this employer can make his position satisfactory or intoler- 
able. 

Nothing is more fallacious than to call labour questions 
simply a matter of wages or money. Quite apart from the 



TRADES-UNIONISM 317 

price of the labour, there are in most trades a multitude of 
conditions and circumstances which make the whole differ- 
ence to the well-being of the workmen. Do men know, for 
instance, the life of a London bricklayer, who changes his 
lodging often once a quarter, and often walks six miles before 
he begins his ten-hour day at six o'clock? Every time he 
has to change his employer (who at most, on his side, has to 
wait till he gets another man), the workman has to give up 
his home, break up his household, separate from his wife, 
draw his children from school, and suffer infinite differences 
affecting his comfort, health, and plans. A few weeks out 
of work may ruin the prospects of his son, injure his family's 
health, turn them out of a familiar home, and change him 
to a broken man. Let us remember that this competition 
implies the constant locomotion of families. And then let 
us trace out the moral and mental consequences of this 
chance life. Even in the higher branches an artisan family 
lead a frightfully nomad existence. Any one who has known 
working-men in their homes must have been painfully struck 
with the difficulty of tracing them after a few months. What 
would be the feeling of our middle classes to be subject to 
a similar competition — a competition not confined to their 
warehouses, and affecting only their balance-sheet, but one 
which tossed about their homes like counters, brought them 
now and then to the gate of the workhouse, and rode at 
random over every detail of their lives ? 

Much of this is of course inevitable. It is a life which 
happily has its compensations. But what concerns us now is 
to see how utterly different is this state of things from the 
selling of a commodity. What sale of a commodity affects 
this complex network of human relations? It would be as 
right to speak of every trader needing a partner, every 
woman ready for marriage, every applicant for a post of 



318 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

trust, as having a commodity to sell. The followers of Na- 
poleon and Garibaldi were not simply men having a commod- 
ity to sell. The engagement of a workman for hire is, as 
completely as these cases are, an instance of a voluntary 
combination of energies and capacities. The union of capi- 
talist and labourers is, in the highest sense, a partnership in- 
volving a real equality of duties and powers, — they finding 
the strength, the patience, the manual skill, the physical ex- 
haustion, — he finding the management, the machinery, the 
immediate means of subsistence, and, by rights, the protec- 
tion of all kinds. He and they are as necessary to each other 
as men in any relation of life. They can affect each other 
as intimately for good and for bad as can any partners what- 
ever. The dignity of their work and lives rests in their 
knowing and performing their mutual duties and their com- 
mon tasks. Applied to this noble and intimate relation of 
life — this grand institution of society — the language of 
the market or of barter is a cruel and senseless cant. Nor 
will any sound condition of labour exist until the captains 
of Industry come to feel themselves to be life-long fellow- 
soldiers with the lowest fighter in the Battle of Labour, and 
have ceased to speak of themselves as speculators who go 
into one market to buy fifty shillings' worth of pig-iron, and 
into another to buy fifty shillings' worth of puddling. 

It is essentially for this sort of protection that unionism is 
devised. Any one who regards it as a simple instrument 
to raise wages is, as Adam Smith says, "as ignorant of the 
subject as of human nature." Unionism, above all, aims at 
making regular, even, and safe the workman's life. No one 
who had not specially studied it would conceive the vast array 
of grievances against which unionism and strikes are di- 
rected. If we looked only to that side of the question, we 
should come to fancy that from the whole field of labour 



TRADES-UNIONISM 319 

there went up one universal protest against injustice. There 
is a "miserable monotony" of wrong and suffering in it. 
Excessive labour, irregular labour, spasmodic overwork, 
spasmodic locking-out, "overtime," "short time," double 
time, night work, Sunday work, truck in every form, over- 
lookers' extortion, payment in kind, wages reduced by draw- 
backs, "long pays," or wages held back, fines, confiscations, 
rent and implements irregularly stopped out of wages, evic- 
tions from tenements, "black lists" of men, short weights, 
false reckoning, forfeits, children's labour, women's labour, 
unhealthy labour, deadly factories and processes, unguarded 
machinery, defective machinery, preventible accidents, reck- 
lessness from desire to save, — in countless ways we find a 
waste of human life, health, well-being, and power, which 
are not represented in the ledgers or allowed for in bargains. 
Let any one read such a Blue-book as that on the employ- 
ment of children, which contains much on labour generally. 
It reads like one long catalogue of oppression. Every prac- 
tice which can ruin body and spirit, — every form of igno- 
rance, disease, degradation, and destitution comes up in 
turn. The higher trades, as that of the iron-workers, are 
free from many of these, from most of them, but overwork 
and truck and forfeits. But take the records of any trade, 
and it will furnish a dark catalogue of struggles about one or 
more of these grievances. Take the Reports of the Medi- 
cal Inspectors to the Privy Council, of the Inspectors of Mines 
and certain classes of factories, or that of the Staffordshire 
potteries. Take the Report of the Miners' Association often 
cited. It reads like one long indictment against the reckless- 
ness of capital and the torpidity of the legislature. It is not 
that each individual capitalist produces or even knows such 
things. Not he, but the system is at fault. The wrong each 
man does is not great, — that which he does intentionally is 



320 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

very small. But as a body they all work out this one end 
blindly; for a sophistical jargon, falsely called Economic 
Science, has trained them to think that fifty shillings' worth 
of puddling — that is, the lives of men, women, and children 
— should be bought and sold in market overt, like pigs and 
bars of iron. 

Against this state of things, as yet, the only organised pro- 
tection is unionism. It is a system at bottom truly conserva- 
tive, mainly protective, and essentially legal. It is a system 
still quite undeveloped, and most defective, and often deeply 
corrupted. But it is one, it must be remembered, which has 
as yet no fair chance. It is proscribed by the legislature, and 
as yet unrecognised. What prospect is there of these insti- 
tutions being healthy, well managed, and moderate, whilst 
they cannot get the legal sanction which the humblest asso- 
ciation obtains? They can hold no property, bring no 
action, have no assistance or protection from the law. Just 
as under the old Combination Laws strikes were often thor- 
oughly evil in their action, so now under the Association Laws 
unions are forced into the attitude of conspiracies. These 
evils are mainly due to the craven injustice shown to them 
by parliaments of employers. But even now they are, in 
the main, moderately, honestly, and wisely directed. Their 
managers are sometimes dishonest adventurers; their sys- 
tem is sometimes corrupt; but there is not a tenth of the 
corruption of our ordinary railway and joint-stock company 
system. Sometimes, however, they are models of good gov- 
ernment. Occasionally they call out men of the finest and 
noblest political instincts, men cast in the very mould of 
Hampden. 

This is not the place to discuss at length their great 
deficiencies; but no man is more aware how far they fall 
short of what is wanted than the present writer. In the first 



TRADES-UNIONISM 32 1 

place, they are simply a political, practical, temporary 
remedy for a social and moral evil. The real cause of all 
industrial evils is the want of a higher moral spirit in all 
engaged in industry alike. Social and moral remedies 
alone, in the long run, can change the state of things to 
health; and the working-men on their side have as much 
to learn in social and moral duty as their employers. All 
this (and without it nothing permanent can be gained) 
unionism totally ignores, and even tends to conceal and 
choke. Hence a keen spirit of unionism often blunts the 
members of a strong association to their own duties and 
to the higher wants of their class. If small, the association 
too often fosters a narrow, sometimes a most selfish spirit. 
Often it fosters a dull temper of indifference and comfortable 
disregard of all others around. It often encourages the 
combative spirit and a love of visible triumph. Occa- 
sionally, as at Sheffield, it develops cruel tyranny. Above 
all, it seriously divides trade from trade, skilled workmen 
from unskilled, unionist from non-unionist. 

These, however, are all evils not so much inherent in 
the nature of unions as caused by their want of permanent 
and legal position, public recognition, larger extension, 
wider combination, and higher education. The grand 
evil inherent in their nature is that they are simply political 
expedients, and share all the defects of political remedies 
applied to social diseases. Still, if Reform Leagues and 
constitutional agitation, or, in the last resort, organised 
resistance to oppression, do not cure the maladies of the 
state, they are essentially necessary — and, sometimes, 
are the first necessity. To save the people from the im- 
mediate injuries of bad government is sometimes the very 
condition of all other effort towards improvement. If 
working-men, holding by their union for simply protective 



322 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

purposes, would turn towards other measures to improve 
themselves, to learn greater self-control, higher education, 
and purer domestic life, their ends would be gained. In 
the meantime, as a step to them, as giving a breathing time 
and support, unionism is indispensable. To consolidate 
and elevate it is, perhaps, the working-man's first duty. 
For in the midst of the increasing power and recklessness 
of capital one can see no immediate safeguard but this 
against the ruin of the workman's life, his annihilation as 
a member of society — against the consequent deteriora- 
tion of the community, and ultimate social revolution. 



Ill 

INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 

(1865) 

From the year* i860 I was associated with some of the most 
ardent apostles of the Co-operative Movement, such 
as Thomas Hughes, J. Malcolm Ludlow, Lloyd Jones, 
Br. Furnivall, and G. J. Holyoake; and I shared 
their interest and hopes for the new schemes. With 
introductions from them and many friends in the North, 
I visited the Pioneers in Rochdale, and attended many 
Co-operative committees and meetings in Lancashire and 
Yorkshire. Having personal knowledge of the leaders 
and their methods, and having made a study of their 
printed Rules, Tables, and Balance-sheets, I had ample 
means of forming an estimate of their work and prospects, 

I saw that, whilst the system of "Distributive Stores" 
was a real success and was destined to a great develop- 
ment, both material and social, the attempt to found Co- 
operative Production for the general market was a petty 
and unstable incident which could have no future. And 
I saw that the hope of those who looked for Co-operative 
Production to reorganise the conditions of Labour was 
an idle dream. Co-operation could do nothing to super- 
sede or even to reform the current system of Wages- 
earning. 

I made bold to tell this to my friends. More than 
323 



324 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

forty years have passed; and, whilst the "Stores" have 
had a marvellous growth, "Production" in the open 
market is still a drop in the ocean of Labour, "Co- 
operation" has taught more than two millions of work- 
ing people to supply themselves with necessaries in 
methods of strict economy and thrift. It has not enabled 
the mass of the proletariat to mend the conditions of 
Labour by more than a haifs breadth. On the contrary it 
only draws off some admirable men from turning to 
deeper and wiser means of salvation. 

The "Stores" have continued to double their numbers 
and their business with every decade. For independent 
"Production" i.e. manufactures sold to other than "Co- 
operators" the result is infinitesimal. And as to "Co- 
operative Production" benefiting workmen who are not 
shareholders or members, the result is a pitiable minimum. 

The excellent account in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
{vol. xxvii.), by Mr. Aneurin Williams (1902), which 
gives a total business of more than 75 millions, sets down 
the profits of Productive Societies at £158,315 — and a 
Dividend on Wages of £20,545 — and that is on a trade 
of three millions and a half. 

The latest work on Co-operative Industry that I 
have seen is by Ernest Ames (1007). He tells us in 
his chapter on the Productive Societies that "the position 
of Labour is very similar to that which is found in or- 
dinary well and considerately managed centres of in- 
dustry." Again he adds: "Labour is left by the great 
bulk of modern co-operative enterprise in an unchanged 
economic relationship." That is exactly the warning 
I gave in 1865 to my friends, the Co-operators; and 
it is sad to relate the disappointment of such high and 
worthy hopes (1908). 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION - 325 

"Let us abandon all useless and irritating discussion as to 
the origin and distribution of wealth, and proceed at once 
to establish the moral rules which should regulate it as a 
social function." — Auguste Comte. 

Two serious attempts to raise their condition are being 
made by the working classes from their own spontaneous 
efforts. Both have been conceived, elaborated, and main- 
tained by their unaided instinct. One of these — unionism 
— has been abundantly discussed. The other is co-opera- 
tion. The first is the political, direct, immediate remedy 
for industrial wants. The second is more nearly the social, 
gradual, and indirect process. Unionism is an open and 
organised resistance ; and, pushed to the extreme, approaches 
to political insurrection. Co-operation is an effort towards 
social reform, and in its type verges on social revolution. 
Both have played, and are destined to play, a large part 
in the progress of industry. Each maintains most valuable 
truths and attains many excellent results. Both are of the 
deepest interest to the social enquirer. Each, however, 
is imperfect and somewhat one-sided. Each ignores the 
very important side which the other represents. To esti- 
mate them truly they must be viewed at the same glance 
and judged by comparison. 

In dealing with co-operation, it is hardly possible to 
speak in a much more judicial and critical spirit than it 
is in speaking of unionism. Trades unions have been 
the object of so much ignorant abuse, that a friendly writer 
is forced into an attitude of controversy and almost of ad- 
vocacy. With co-operation, it is very desirable that its 
weak side should be insisted on at least as fully as its strongest. 
Its partisans and even the public are rather inclined to ex- 
aggerate its importance. During Elections one sees many 



326 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

candidates on both sides, who guard themselves from be- 
traying many definite opinions, loudly proclaim themselves 
in favour of "co-operation." Doubtless it would have 
been as much to the purpose to proclaim themselves staunch 
adherents of the penny post, or ardent friends of the half- 
holiday movement. Of course, as the Legislature has, 
and can have, nothing to do with co-operation, it was totally 
out of place in candidates' addresses. And many of them 
would have shrunk from the great revolution which " co- 
operation" really is in the minds of its most active apostles. 
This, however, proved that it is considered a safe thing to 
profess; and serves to indicate interest in social questions. 
But as it is beset by no prejudices whatever, it is only right 
that its value and its defects be impartially brought out; 
and that its adherents may not mislead themselves as to its 
promises. 

This enquiry is specially opportune, as the annual return 
of the Registrar of Friendly Societies is now before us, and 
we are able to take stock of the co-operative movement 
from official authority. On the 31st of December 1864 
there were, according to this return, 505 registered societies 
spread over almost the whole of England, in town, village, 
and county. The total number of members (several returns 
being defective) is 129,761, the share capital is £685,072, 
the loan capital is £89,423, the assets and property amount 
to £891,775, the business done in the year is £2,742,957, 
and the profit realised is £225, 569. 1 As no societies neg- 
lected to send returns, these figures would probably need 
to be corrected by an addition of 10 or 15 per cent. These 
societies are all, with very few exceptions (almost all of which 
decline to send returns), "stores" for the sale of food and 

1 This has been enormously increased. The members are now in excess 
of two millions. The capital is nearly 30 millions sterling and the business 
75 millions sterling (1908). 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 327 

clothing. The average profit, it will be seen, amounts 
to something like 9 per cent (in one case it is 25 per cent) 
on the business done, and something like 30 per cent (in 
some cases 50 per cent) on the share and loan capital. Only 
thirteen of the 395 societies that make returns fail to show 
a profit, and these are, with one notable exception, very 
small or young companies commencing operations. The 
profit may be taken as enough to pay a dividend of is. 7d. 
in the pound upon all purchases after payment of expenses, 
gifts, depreciation, and ^5 per cent interest on shares and 
loans. Many of the principal societies far exceed this, and 
the famous Pioneers (by no means a single instance), after 
providing for interest on loans and shares, educational 
fund, reserve fund, depreciation fund, and charity, still 
paid last quarter 2s. 4d. in the pound on members' pur- 
chases. A return this which railway shareholders might 
study with profit, if not with satisfaction ! 

This success, however, which can be measured by tabular 
statements, is far the smallest portion. The indirect effect 
of co-operation which cannot be reduced to figures is vast 
and pervading. In a northern city which had long suffered 
from adulterated flour, a co-operative flour-mill was estab- 
lished. It not only supplied a perfectly pure article to its 
own large body of members and customers, but (in order 
to stand their ground) the other mills of the city were obliged 
to do the same. The first thing that a well-managed and 
extensive store does in a town is to destroy a number of 
useless and dishonest shops all round the neighbourhood, 
the second is visibly to reduce destitution and the poor- 
rates, the third, where it is very strong, is to diminish strikes 
and sensibly improve wages. Whatever stirs the active 
and resolute spirits of a district to fresh union, patience, 
and self-denial, and gives them a considerable common 



328 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

fund and puts a small sum at the free disposal of each, at 
once raises their tone and makes them independent of instant 
necessities. And the change is one which in different ways, 
but with equal distinctness, makes itself felt by the employer, 
the clergyman, the schoolmaster, the publican, and the 
policeman. 

The case of Rochdale is naturally the most striking that 
can be taken. There the Pioneers Society alone now num- 
bers 5200 members, with a capital of £71,000, and an annual 
business of £200,000. Associated with it is the Corn-mill 
Society and the Cotton Manufacturing Company, both 
owned and worked principally by the same class. The 
effect of this movement on the town is most obvious. Dur- 
ing the worst times of the cotton distress the Pioneers 
was unshaken. The material prosperity and well-being of 
the whole town has received an impetus from it. The 
"store" has affected for good the moral, intellectual, and 
industrial tone of a large city. Its mere existence is sufficient 
to make it almost secured against either great demoralisa- 
tion or great destitution. The importance of this work is 
recognised by all classes of the inhabitants. There have 
been no more zealous friends of the movement than the 
clergy, many of the municipal officers, and both the late 
and the present representative in Parliament. The Roch- 
dale movement, which dates from 1844, owes its origin and 
its success to a knot of men of very remarkable character 
and ability. There were amongst the founders some men 
of real mercantile genius — men who might have made 
their own fortunes ten times over — which they united 
with the power of inspiring and directing their fellows. 
Some of them are still at their post at Rochdale, rich in 
nothing but the gratitude and esteem of their fellow-citizens, 
for whilst they might easily have raised themselves amongst 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 329 

the great millionaires of Lancashire they were contented 
with giving prosperity to a city and new energy to the work- 
ing classes of England. 

The effect of a very flourishing store, and even of a small 
manufacturing society, in one of the northern valleys, where 
factories are more or less shut off from free correspondence 
with the neighbourhood, is to produce a very perceptible 
rise of wages; the society, either as a bank, or as an em- 
ployer, often as both, forms a reserve, on which the workman 
can fall back if dismissed. But of course this result is only 
visible when isolation or local circumstances enable a single 
society to make itself felt. Another immediate effect is 
that of the ready-money system, which is universally and 
very strictly enforced at the co-operative shops. They 
form also the most complete and valuable savings-bank — 
the saving being effected continually upon every daily pur- 
chase, retained out of the immediate control of the investor, 
and usually unperceived by him. Thus a member of the 
Rochdale store, upon every pound of tea or piece of bacon 
which he buys, drops about twelve per cent of the price 
(the ordinary retailer's profit) into his money-box, which 
at the end of the year comes out a respectable sum. This 
process is locally embodied in the formula, "the more one 
eats the more one gets." A species of savings-bank with 
which no other can remotely compare ! Adulteration in 
goods is almost invariably and completely checked by a 
store. Without exception, they may be said to sell per- 
fectly sound and fair goods; and multitudes of working 
people, who never knew the taste of pure tea or coffee, or 
wholesome bread or flour, have become very sharp critics 
as to quality, for they purchase wholesale, by their agents, 
the very best which the markets offer. 

No reasonable observer, however, can imagine that 



33© NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

accumulating savings, avoiding debt, obtaining good and 
cheap food, or the "making a pound go a long way," is 
the sole feature, though it is the main feature, of the co- 
operative system. Co-operation now numbers a large 
and highly organised band of propagandists. It forms 
a new "persuasion" in itself, with all the machinery and 
enthusiasm of a religious sect. There are men who devote 
themselves to preach and extend co-operation, just as there 
are men who devote themselves to awakening souls or ad- 
vocating temperance. In every society there are men who 
give their time, labour, and often the savings of their lives, 
to found and establish a new "store" or to bring their neigh- 
bours to look on the system as a vital truth. The "pledge," 
the abolition of slavery, free trade, and "Bible religion," 
have never been preached with more systematic activity 
than this has. It has its organ, its lectures, its "confer- 
ences," its dogmas, its celebrations, and it would not be an 
English institution if it had not its testimonials and its 
subscription funds. 

It has developed a style of thought and speech which 
is strangely akin to that of a religious movement, and in 
co-operation tracts the system is expounded in phrases 
which are in familiar use with reference to sacred subjects. 
The nucleus of many a flourishing society consists of men 
who have a strong impulse for social improvement, and 
whose motives are at least as strongly the benefit of their 
fellows as that of themselves. No one can read the Co- 
operator regularly without seeing that it records a move- 
ment in which some of the finest characters and spirits 
amongst the working classes, from one end of England to 
the other, are absorbed; without admiring the energy, 
perseverance, sagacity, and conscientiousness which these 
efforts display; without learning to respect the spirit of 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 33 1 

union, faith, and self-sacrifice which they frequently exert. 
The constant acts of benevolence, of unflinching patience, 
and of well-deserved confidence, with which co-operative 
records are full, are truly touching. Co-operative poetry 
alone forms a literature in itself; and in the Co-operator's 
pages one may often read a piece full of terse, vigorous lines, 
which, if not exactly a poem, is eloquent versification. Nor 
can any man of feeling or discernment witness a really 
worthy co-operative celebration — see those Lancashire 
or Yorkshire workmen, with their wives and children, meet 
in their own hall, surrounded by their own property, to con- 
sider their own affairs — hear them join in singing, some- 
times a psalm, sometimes a chorus — listen to the homely 
wit, the prudent advice, the stirring appeal, and feel the 
spirit of goodwill, conviction, and resolution in which they 
are met to celebrate, as it were, their escape from Egyptian 
bondage, — no one, if present at such a meeting, can fail 
to recognise that co-operation, if not a moral or social move- 
ment in itself, has had the benefit of many high, moral, 
and social tendencies to stimulate and foster it. 

The best testimony for co-operation, in its form of the 
" store" system, is this — that in every leading town, men 
recognised as the most able, conscientious, and energetic of 
their order amongst the working classes, will generally be 
found active supporters of the "store"; and those amongst 
the independent and educated classes who sympathise most 
earnestly and wisely with the welfare of the working classes, 
will be found to acknowledge its claims and services. No 
man of generous feeling can help being moved to admiration 
when he recalls the homes which have been saved and bright- 
ened ; the weight of debt, friendlessness, destitution, and bad 
habits which have been relieved ; the hope and spirit which 
have been infused into the working classes by this single 



332 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

agency — the co-operative system. It has come successfully 
through the trial of the cotton distress; it is spreading into 
every corner, even every rural village in England, and is 
firmly established in Germany and France. 

It is precisely the great influence which co-operation now 
exercises, and the very high qualities which are devoted to 
its extension, that render it the more essential to examine it 
closely — to know exactly what it can and what it cannot 
do — what are its defects and its dangers. The men who 
have founded and support these institutions are far too 
straightforward and resolute to fear any honest judgment 
upon their efforts. The last thing that they would choose 
would be any attempt to shut out the truth from themselves, 
or any one else, respecting the system; and once convinced 
of the fairness and goodwill of the counsellor or critic, they 
will attend to genuine counsel or criticism with patience and 
impartiality. In this spirit the following remarks are offered 
by one who has more than a mere goodwill for the movement 
in its legitimate sphere, and as a material expedient ; who has 
a strong esteem and sympathy for it, its objects and its ad- 
herents; who recognises in it and them some of the very 
best grounds of hope now extant; and who desires only to 
define somewhat more closely the true scope and limits of 
co-operation. 

Let us come at once to the key of the whole position. 
Co-operation, it is usually said, is designed to elevate the 
condition of labour by associating capital with labour, and 
by giving to labour an equal interest with capital in the 
results of production. It is also said (and with truth) to be 
in a flourishing condition, and to have firm ground to rest 
on. Now what is the case actually? Flourishing as co- 
operation clearly is in a pecuniary sense (with the exception 
of a very small number of manufacturing societies to be 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 333 

noticed presently), the whole of the co-operative societies 
throughout the kingdom are simply " stores," i.e. shops for 
the sale of food, and sometimes clothing. These, of course, 
cannot affect the condition of industry materially. Labour 
here does not in any sense share in the produce with capital. 
The relation of employer and employed remains just the 
same, and not a single workman would change the conditions 
of his employment if the store were to extinguish all the shops 
of a town. 

In such an extreme case, the workmen would still be hired 
for wages in the ordinary competition of labour, for the shops 
do not employ any of them. The cloth, flour, tea, and meat 
which the store now supplies, have all been made under the 
same conditions as before, and are simply purchased in open 
market in the ordinary way. The cotton goods sold at the 
store have probably been grown by the labour of negroes, 
and manufactured under the hardest rule of competition. 
If co-operation (so far as the stores are concerned) were 
developed to a point beyond the wildest dreams of its friends ; 
if it absorbed the entire retail trade of the country, and there 
were no such thing as a shop left for rich or poor, it would 
still, for any direct effect it has, leave the "labour market" 
just where it found it, for'not a single article would be pro- 
duced (though all would be distributed) in a different way 
from heretofore. Hence a "store" as such, does not affect 
the true labour question directly. So that what we mean 
when we say that "co-operation" is a great movement, is 
that working-men have devised a highly convenient and 
economic plan of buying their food and part of their 
clothing. 

No doubt there is the whole indirect effect of this system, 
the freedom from debt, the accumulation of saving, the busi- 
ness experience, and all the countless other advantages which 



334 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

we have set forth and urged in preceding pages. No one can 
overlook them, and scarcely can exaggerate them. But these 
are in themselves purely economic arrangements of practical 
convenience, and cannot affect the social conditions of labour 
otherwise than as economic arrangements can. The prac- 
tice of savings banks is a highly useful economic arrangement, 
which has done a vast amount of good. So is the penny post. 
The ready-money principle is a valuable rule. The practice 
of accumulating savings, of not living up to one's income, the 
habit of regular economy, of giving a fair price for a sound 
article, as also the habit of early rising, are excellent bits of 
worldly wisdom to which the successful man often attributes 
his wealth. But these things, useful as they are, especially 
as contributing to a rise in life, are not vital movements of 
society or new revelations. They form merely the mode in 
which the capitalist classes have amassed their wealth, and 
they are often most conspicuously practised by men who 
have won and who use their wealth in the worst way. 

The very men with whom labour has had the hardest 
struggle, are just those who exemplify the value of these rules. 
And it is significant that the men who are the most earnest 
advocates of this species of economic prudence, are just the 
men who are known as the most hardened followers of the 
barrenest schools of political economy, to whom Competition 
is a sort of social panacea and beneficent dispensation. It 
can hardly be that industry is to be regenerated simply by 
the working classes coming to practise the penny-wise eco- 
nomics of the getters of capital. It is much to be desired that 
this useful kind of prudence was more common. But if 
co-operation is to end in simply putting £5 or £10 into safe 
investments for working-men, it is scarcely worthy of the 
fervent language which addresses it as a new gospel of the 
future, or of poems to celebrate its noble mission upon earth. 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 335 

We might as well expect them to be produced about a goose 
club. 

There is no mystery about co-operation, nor, indeed, any- 
thing very original. Railways and joint-stock companies in 
general are simply co-operative societies; so is a goose club, 
so are all the clubs in Pall Mall. The new working-men's 
clubs are so still more, and this admirable movement pos- 
sesses also a great many of the advantages of the co-operative 
system, and is free from some of its defects. In fact, wher- 
ever a number of persons join their small capitals into one 
capital, of which they manage to share the profit or the 
benefit (a system as old at least as the Romans), a true 
co-operative society exists. No doubt there are no companies 
(or very few) in which the subdivisions of shares are so small 
and the facilities so great as to enable working-men to invest 
out of their savings. But that is only an accident. It is 
quite easy to conceive a joint-stock company with very small 
shares, for some petty local object, very much connected 
with the working class — and many land and building socie- 
ties are thus connected — which would be (many of them 
now are) classed strictly as co-operative societies. 

There are plenty of such little speculations, got up by 
pushing men of the people, owned and managed by them 
and their friends, which figure in the long list of the co- 
operative roll. They are very useful institutions, which bring 
a good dividend to the prudent investor — and so are gas 
companies. Now the "stores" offer a number of useful and 
incidental advantages which very few companies do. But in 
principle "stores" are joint-stock companies for the sale of 
food and clothing. As such "they are doing a vast amount 
of good; but the industrial question is not solved, or even 
materially affected, because working-men have devised and de- 
veloped a very useful form of the joint-stock company system. 



336 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

But as we have shown above, a man must be very short- 
sighted to see nothing more than this in the system as it now 
exists. There is a great deal more, only it is entirely sub- 
ordinate and very indefinite. There is a widespread wish 
for social improvement, a spirit of self-sacrifice, and an un- 
selfish enthusiasm which is very general in the movement. 
Gas companies do not subscribe to help each other in diffi- 
culties. Railway companies are not given to educational 
funds. Directors do not usually give their services gratui- 
tously. Joint-stock companies' meetings, when they declare 
a dividend or dead loss, do not straightway sing a hymn, and 
appeal to each other, with tears in their eyes, to stand like 
men to the Limited Liability Act. 

There is something in this movement not explicable by 
love of cash. But all this amounts to no more than that some 
very noble, earnest, and powerful spirits have thrown them- 
selves into the movement. It is part of the social feeling and 
the strong sympathy which marks every effort of the genuine 
sons of labour in England, and, indeed, in Europe. But if 
it is a true part of co-operation at all, it is a part so indefinite, 
so ill-understood, and so very much disputed, that it cannot be 
said to be more than an adjunct. In itself, simply, co-operation 
is a joint-stock system for the association of small capitals. 
This has been practised by the rich for centuries, without 
any particular moral or social result. The prospectuses of 
new companies contain everything except homilies on the 
beauty of association. But the moral and social spirit which 
undoubtedly often accompanies co-operation is so very little 
defined, and is so devoid of any principle, system, or recog- 
nised rule whatever, that it cannot keep its ground beside 
the practical clear end of a good dividend. Co-operation 
may mean either the making and saving of money, or the 
joint labour of all for all. It may also mean partly one, 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 7>37 

partly the other. But if so, the relative proportions and 
limits of these two must be determined. Until this is done, 
co-operation is a mere form of pecuniary investment. 

Now this question is all the more essential because no 
candid friend of the movement can deny that it is one on 
which its supporters are wholly divided. Most societies 
have within them more or less distinctly two parties, the one 
the men who look on the system as an economic, the other as 
a social, instrument. The first are sincerely desirous to 
become and to see their fellows become small capitalists; 
and then, in the words of one of the addresses, "the great 
problem of social economy is for the working classes to keep 
themselves with their own money." These men look on 
anything else as Communism, and they are strict Political 
Economists. The other party fervently desire to see a 
system in which the share of capital in profit is reduced, and 
in which capital freely devotes part of its profit to labour; 
and these men are disciples of some kind of Socialist scheme, 
and very often previously Owenites or actual Communists. 
The latter are the more enthusiastic, the former are the better 
men of business. Both are useful, but they differ, as the dis- 
cussions and divisions in the societies show. At present the 
economic school always carries the greatest weight and a 
majority of votes. The result is generally a friendly com- 
promise ; and an address which opens with a fervent call to 
the members to "elevate themselves by making money," 
closes with a motto in verse. 

Each for all, and all for each, 
Helping, loving one another. 

There is, however, a certain poetic vagueness often about 
the social element. Facts and acts are distinct; and, I 
believe, there is now no co-operative society existing which 



338 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

gives any substantial part of its income to others than the 
members who share the capital. There are, however, unmis- 
takably two real sections in the co-operative world, and also 
in its friends: those who desire to see the privileges and 
power of capital extended to working-men by their becoming 
capitalists; and those who desire to see working-men re- 
lieved, by capital being deprived of much of its privileges 
and its power. These two parties, though quite friendly, 
are widely different, and at present, in the division list, the 
former have their way. 

In the face of this great fact, which contains the key of 
co-operation as a social system, it is needless to consider the 
value of the general principles which are vaguely supposed 
to be connected with it. They can have no stability, for they 
do not rest on any accepted set of truths, or any recognised 
principle of action. One man writes to ask the Co-operator 
if Sunday trading is not contrary to the "true principle of 
co-operation." The editor of that useful and instructive 
periodical plainly considers that alcohol is; and he vigor- 
ously calls to order a "store" which ventured to sell beer. 
Of course, co-operation has no more to do with teetotalism 
than it has with Methodism. 

If "co-operation" means a general term for all the moral 
and prudential virtues, or rather for what each man takes 
these to be, it means nothing. Nothing so vague can make 
any great effect. The thoughtful men amongst the working 
classes know well that for the permanent improvement of 
their order much more remains than that some should save 
a little money, and all buy cheaper and better food. Social 
wants require social remedies, and such things are mere 
delusions unless they are based on sound social philosophy. 
Modern life is not so simple a thing that it can be reformed 
by prudent maxims, with or without fine sentiments. Nor 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 339 

is our industrial system so feeble a matter that it can be 
moved by vague professions of good-fellowship. Stripped of 
this, co-operation is one of the best, perhaps far the best, of 
economic expedients for increasing the comfort, health, and 
happiness of the poor man's home; but as such it cannot 
claim to have solved or even dealt with the industrial prob- 
lems of society. As a system under which labour is to gain 
a new position, and stand on fairer terms with capital, it has 
yet everything to do; for it has neither done nor even sug- 
gested anything tangible. 

We have hitherto purposely kept out of view the real 
manufacturing societies. These are co-operative societies 
which are employers of labour. Here, then, the system does 
grapple with the position of labour and capital. But what 
is the result? As a test, the experiment is scarcely favour- 
able. The manufacturing societies are extremely few, they 
are not yet exactly successful as speculations, and they do 
nothing but pay the labourer his ordinary market wages. They 
are chiefly flour-mills and cotton-mills. Now the flour-mills 
have paid large and regular dividends, have done a con- 
siderable business, and have been admirably managed, and 
of course have had their hard times. But these are not 
strictly manufacturing societies; they supply chiefly their 
own members and other co-operative societies, and may be 
more properly classed with the "stores." The amount ex- 
pended in labour is extremely small compared with that for 
raw material and plant. They naturally employ at times 
workmen unconnected with the society; but I have never 
understood that mere workmen employed by them ever re- 
ceive anything but the market rate of wages, or any particular 
advantage, privilege, or perquisite. Nor do I think any 
societies in the kingdom remunerate their ordinary work- 
people in any other way than the usual mode. Frequently 



340 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

these people are shareholders, but very often are not; and 
in any case the society, or rather company, wanting labour, 
goes into the market, and gives the price of labour as fixed 
by competition; just as a railway company does. The fact 
that the holders of the shares in the " store" or "mill" are 
for the most part (they are not always) real working-men, is 
a very important and interesting fact; but it does not affect 
the conditions of labour, or add appreciably to the wages of 
their "hands." 

The flour-mills apart — which are very successful and use- 
ful modes of making money — the other manufacturing 
societies are insignificant, until we come to the cotton-mills. 
Here and there an association of bootmakers, hatters, paint- 
ers, or gilders is carried on, upon a small scale, with vary- 
ing success. The plate-lockmakers of Wolverhampton (who 
have been recently carrying on a struggle with the competing 
capitalists so gallantly) are another instance. But small 
bodies of handicraftsmen (or rather artists) working in com- 
mon, with moderate capital, plant, and premises, obviously 
establish nothing. The only true instances of manufactur- 
ing co-operative societies of any importance are the cotton- 
mills. During the great cotton fever which preceded the 
distress, several mills were started or projected. Some of 
them for a time seemed promising. The great Lancashire 
famine, however, came on them almost before they had got 
to work; and it would be impossible to draw any inference 
whatever from them. Some of the mills, however, never got 
to work at all. Some took the simple form of ordinary joint- 
stock companies, in few hands. Others passed into the 
hands of small capitalists, or the shares were concentrated 
amongst the promoters. 

There is now, I believe, no co-operative cotton-mill owned 
by working-men in actual operation on any scale, with the 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 34 1 

notable exception of Rochdale. The Rochdale mill deserves 
consideration by itself. Rochdale, it is well known, is in a 
special sense the cradle of co-operation. As Mr. Holyoake 
tells us in his admirable account of its rise there in 1844, 
" Human nature must be different at Rochdale from what it 
is anywhere else." Its rise may be distinctly traced to the 
influence of Owenism, and some of its leading promoters 
there, besides being men of real industrial genius, are deeply 
imbued with many valuable principles which Robert Owen 
upheld. The Rochdale cotton-mill once bid fair to be an 
extraordinary success in a commercial view. Their buildings 
are not surpassed by any, and equalled by few, in the county ; 
their management has been cautious and able; their credit 
stands in the money-market even higher than that of neigh- 
bouring capitalists; they weathered the storm of the cotton 
distress perhaps better than any, being almost the last to 
close and the first to open; and they are now running full 
time. They have, in fact, proved that it is quite possible for 
a cotton-mill (at any rate) to be worked on the largest scale, 
with a successful result, on the co-operative principle. 

What, however, they have not proved is the possibility of 
a mill being wholly owned by those who work it, and of labour 
receiving more than the ordinary market share of the profits. 
The mill was founded on the principle of dividing all profits 
(after satisfying all expenses and the interest on fixed capital) 
equally between the shareholders and the workmen, every 
£100 received in wages counting in the distribution of the 
dividend the same as every £100 invested in shares. This 
principle was a real experiment to institute a new condition 
of labour. The mill had not worked long, however, before 
(in 1861) this principle, after a severe struggle, was aban- 
doned, and no efforts of the minority, backed by many in- 
fluential friends of the movement, have succeeded in restor- 



342 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

ing it. This, therefore, in the great home of co-operation, 
has for the present decided the issue. The question how to 
give the labourer a larger share of the profits has failed of 
solution. A body of co-operative capitalists, it is there seen, 
hire and pay their own workmen on the ordinary terms of the 
market, and under the rule of simple competition. This is 
the greatest blow, in fact, which the system has ever yet 
sustained, and is one which, if it cannot be reversed, stamps 
it as incompetent to affect permanently the conditions of 
industry. In spite of all efforts which faith, hope, and 
charity make to conceal it, this decision has planted a deep 
root of division amongst the co-operative body, and has 
broken the confidence of their most zealous friends. Some 
of the most active friends of the movement as loudly justify 
it as others loudly condemn it. And a long controversy has 
been carried on with great energy and no result. But a vote 
of the whole body of co-operators would undoubtedly show 
for the economic party an overwhelming majority. 

But it may be said that, supposing co-operation distinctly 
to surrender or disclaim every thought of affecting the exist- 
ing conditions and rights of capital, it is fulfilling a great mis- 
sion if it enables the workmen to share the capital ; and the 
Rochdale cotton-mill, although it does not divide its profits 
amongst its workmen, still pays them as shareholders, and in 
one way or other the workmen themselves obtain the share of 
the profits, and gain the security and independence of an 
invested fund. Unfortunately this is not so. The shares of 
this mill are now in a very large proportion held by men who 
are not workmen in it, and not a small proportion is held by 
men who are not now working-men at all. The number of 
shares owned by the ordinary "hands" is not sufficient to 
establish any very important principle. And until this is 
the case, and that permanently, nothing decisive is done. 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 343 

It is an instructive fact that a number of men who are, or 
have been, receiving weekly wages, should own and manage 
important cotton-mills. But as half the fortunes in Lan- 
cashire have been created by such men individually, there is 
nothing astounding in the fact that an association of them 
can do the same. Can it be regarded as the herald of a social 
and moral millennium that a large mill is worked by a com- 
pany which consists of the managers, foremen, and principal 
workmen in it, of several well-to-do men who have been 
working-men and have accumulated savings, and of some of 
the small shopkeepers of a town? Let all men save money 
that can, but society need feel no special enthusiasm at the 
fact that several hundreds of working-men are able to retire 
upon comfortable incomes. 

Now to that, be it said with all regret and soberness, the 
Rochdale cotton-mill seems tending under its present regime. 
If it has not reached it yet, it seems certain that in the course 
of time it must. The process is very obvious to any one who 
knows how these things work. A body of resolute working- 
men, full of enthusiasm and self-reliance, start a manufactur- 
ing society together. The shares cannot, of course, be in- 
alienable, which is opposed to all modern requirements. If 
the concern has only a margin of profit, they struggle on 
heroically, and often carry out their principle for a long time. 
But then the experiment is of doubtful commercial success. 
If the concern thrives greatly and rapidly, the tendency of 
capital is to rush in and absorb the shares as a simple invest- 
ment. Again, the shares naturally aggregate into a few hands. 
Both these tendencies are felt in all successful manufacturing 
societies. They have the greatest difficulty, and have devised 
all sorts of ingenious devices, with little result, to prevent 
them. But do what they will, the shares get more and more 
into the hands of men of some small capital. The nearer 



344 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

this limit is reached, the more completely does the concern 
become a simple joint-stock company. Some of the work- 
men suffer domestic privations, some are improvident, some 
cease work and bequeath their shares, and in countless ways 
the workmen cease to hold the shares. 

The process is very rapid, and occurs under all conceiv- 
able conditions. Even if the strictest provisions existed, 
nothing can prevent capitalists at last owning shares, — or 
shares, at best, accumulating in the hands of the more fortu- 
nate or more skilful shareholders. And even if this were 
done, nothing can prevent the shareholders personally becom- 
ing richer men. A capital, we may suppose, of £50,000 is 
invested in a mill employing 500 men, who equally own the 
shares at the rate of £100 apiece. If trade is very good, and 
the profits as great as they used to be, each of these men, if 
he retained his own shares, and was very industrious, pru- 
dent, and economical — and to succeed most of the members 
must be this — will own in course of years several hundred 
pounds. Is it conceivable that a body of workmen, each 
owning, for instance, £500, will continue one and all at the 
loom and the spindle ? Or would they when each was worth 
£1000? Certainly not. Why should they? Indeed, a man 
who has shown great aptitude in employing capital and 
accumulating wealth, is impelled by every instinct of our 
nature, and habit of our civilisation, to say nothing of being 
probably bound by every claim of domestic and social duty, 
to devote his talent and energy to the employment of capi- 
tal, and to cease to spend his life in running after a "mule." 
A working-man begins to own a small capital ; the qualities 
which have acquired it soon make it a larger capital (in 
Lancashire very soon) ; directly he is a real capitalist he 
ceases to be one of the employed, and becomes one of the 
employers; and as co-operation has simply enabled him to 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 345 

become a capitalist, and refuses to alter the condition of the 
employed, merely as such, the man soon becomes an em- 
ployer of the ordinary type. 

It is not worth much to say that these small capitalists, who 
have been actual working-men, will know and feel the posi- 
tion of their workmen. Unfortunately the successful working- 
men are not those whom their class have most reason to love. 
It is well known that the closest men of business are those 
who have risen from the ranks, whose formula is, "What 
was good enough for me, is good enough for them." And 
working-men well know that if the hardest masters are the 
men who have risen out of their own order, the hardest of 
all is a trading company of such men. It does not appear 
that co-operative societies, as a rule, have very much to 
boast of in their treatment of their own work-people. It will, 
perhaps, be agreed that at many stores the servants are 
rather closely and sparingly treated than otherwise. It is 
quite natural when we remember that their employers are 
men not accustomed to deal with large sums, or make gifts, 
or provide for others; are responsible members of a Board; 
that every detail is scrutinised, and every effort made to find 
the best dividend. There is a well-known case of a very 
flourishing concern which was started by a few associated 
workmen as a co-operative society, which is now simply a 
company in a few hands, not a single workman owning the 
smallest share. It is notorious that this concern deals with 
its people (to say the least) not a whit better than surround- 
ing capitalists. Yet this is nothing but a co-operative society 
which has been wonderfully successful. What would in- 
dustry gain if keen-scented companies like this existed in 
every city of the kingdom? 

Professor Fawcett (in his excellent Manual) thinks that 
the difficulty should be met by the societies making a rule of 



346 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

employing none but shareholders. This is plainly imprac- 
ticable. If workmen who left the mill were compelled 10 
sell their shares, they would cease to form or to give the 
privileges of capital. If workmen to fill their places were 
required, it would be impossible to insist that they should 
purchase shares. It would narrow the labour market to an 
impracticable degree, and no mill could work on such terms. 
And if it could, what an anomaly would be a society founded 
to ameliorate the position of the labourer which made a rule 
of refusing employment to any but those who had a sum of 
ready money in hand ! Besides, how about the women and 
children ? The majority of the work-people of a cotton-mill 
are women and children — wives, lads, and girls. But all 
these ("doffers" included) could hardly have shares, or at 
any rate could not exercise any freedom in them. The 
young folk and children unfortunately have not, as a rule, 
parents in the mill, and often have no parents at all. This 
is just the class on whom capital presses most hardly. To 
them co-operation offers nothing. In short, the idea of the 
workmen permanently owning the capital is illusory. As a 
partial temporary measure in a petty trade like an oyster 
fishery it may be possible for the workers to own the capital 
and plant. In all the larger and complex forms of industry 
it is impossible. The owners of valuable property will not, 
cannot, and ought not to continue at manual labour for wages. 
Nothing can prevent co-operative manufactories from hasten- 
ing rapidly to become simply trading companies. And the 
co-operative system, if it only enables a number of men to 
obtain capital, will do nothing by means of a few vague pro- 
fessions to touch the root of the evil — tJie reckless and selfish 
employment of capital. It will be a system which has its uses 
and its abuses, like the railway system or the banking system, 
but it will leave the moral condition of society, as these do, 
precisely where they are. 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 347 

Hitherto the question of the capacity of co-operative 
societies for success has been kept out of sight intentionally. 
It is plain that the "stores" with reasonably good manage- 
ment and skill are certain of success, often of wonderful 
success. But, as has been shown, the success of men club- 
bing together to buy their own food and clothing is nothing 
at all. We can go much further. We may say that in many 
trades a body of workmen can conduct a business with entire 
commercial success. Where it is a case of exceptional 
profits, as in the cotton trade from 1 858-1 86 1 ; of very small 
capital or plant, as a body of painters, shoemakers, masons, 
etc. (such men are really artificers), where very much depends 
on the personal skill, care, and zeal of each individual work- 
man, no doubt signal success is quite within their reach. 
Associations of the kind, well founded and honestly con- 
ducted, are worthy of every help and confidence. By all 
means let there be plenty such. But all this is a drop in the 
ocean of industry. If there is one thing which the progress 
of civilisation more continually develops, it is that the direc- 
tion of capital requires entire freedom, undivided devotion, 
a life of training, and innate business instincts. 

All our complex forms of industry involve sometimes, in 
the directors, engineering or practical genius, a sort of in- 
stinct of the market, and a life-long familiarity with an in- 
volved mass of considerations, partly mechanical, partly 
monetary, partly administrative. The head of a great pro- 
duction is like the captain of a ship or the general of an army. 
He must have scientific knowledge, technical knowledge, 
practical knowledge, presence of mind, dash, courage, zeal, 
and the habit of command. It is all very well for working- 
men to buy butter and tea prudently, and even to superin- 
tend the agents who buy it for them. But it is ridiculous to 
tell the hammermen at a forge that they can successfully 



348 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

carry on Whitworth's engineering business, or build the 
Great Eastern. Conceive the London and North-Western 
Railway managed by its stokers, porters, and ticket-clerks, 
or the Peninsular and Oriental Steamboat Company carried 
on by a committee of seamen, or the Bank of England man- 
aged by its ordinary cashiers ! These are extreme cases, but 
they strikingly explain the real defect of the position. What 
is the limit? Where does the business become so simple 
that it can be managed by the mere workmen whom it em- 
ploys? Arguments on this subject are almost ridiculous, 
were it not that the extravagant pretensions of some co-op- 
erators seem to call for notice. In a word, no sensible 
man will deny that the great industrial occupations would 
come to disastrous ruin were it not for entire secrecy, rapidity, 
and concentration of action, and that practical instinct of 
trade which nothing but a whole life and a very difficult edu- 
cation can give — and even that can give only to a few. 

It profits little to argue that the bulk of the workmen, 
though unfit to manage, are very fit to superintend the man- 
agement. He who is unfit to manage is not fit to direct the 
manager. The only course open to inexperienced men un- 
dertaking a complex manufacture would be to trust them- 
selves blindly to a skilful director. But if they do, they are 
simply in his hands, and the independence and value of their 
owning the capital is at an end. It cannot be turned both 
ways. Either the manager is controlled by the shareholder, 
in which case success is endangered, or he is free, and then 
they lose responsibility and practical power to affect the 
management. You cannot buy the inspiring authority any 
more than the electric will of a great military or political chief. 
It is impossible to hire commercial genius and the instincts 
of a skilful trader. Nor must it be forgotten that the suc- 
cess of great trading companies proves nothing. They are 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 349 

companies of capitalists, the large majority of whom are by 
the habits of their lives trained to the skilful employment of 
capital, and versed from childhood in the ways of trade. 
And even these men practically entrust the whole manage- 
ment blindly to a few great capitalists among them, any one 
of whom might very well own and direct the whole concern. 
The fact that an association of capitalists can manage a 
gigantic interest does nothing to prove that an association 
of workmen can. A company of merchants, naval men, and 
financiers, whose whole lives have trained them to it, can 
manage the Peninsular and Oriental undertaking. Does 
that prove that a company of able seamen could? 

But this is to repeat for the hundredth time the objections 
against Socialism and Communism. There is no need now, 
or in this country, to expose the unsoundness of these. But 
co-operation, whilst sharing in many of their defects, wholly 
forgets the high aims which make these systems noble in their 
errors. The great-hearted and misjudged enthusiasts who 
taught them, really grasped the industrial evils in their ful- 
ness, and resolutely met them with a cure. They saw that 
the root of the evil was the extreme power and selfishness of 
capital. They met it by destroying the institution of indi- 
vidual property, or by subjecting it to new conditions and 
imposing on it new duties. In Communism, where Labour 
and capital were alike devoted to the common benefit; in 
Socialism, where labour and capital are radically reorgan- 
ised, whatever else of evil they might contain, the relative 
condition of the labourer must certainly have improved. 
But co-operation is a compromise which reduces none of the 
rights of property and imposes on it no new obligation. 
Starting from the same point as Socialism — the anti-social 
use of capital, and the prostration of the labourer before it — 
it seeks to remedy all its consequences by making more 



350 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

capitalists. It faces all the risks which beset the subdivision 
of capital amongst a mass of inexperienced holders, and then 
does nothing to guarantee more justice in the employment of 
that capital in the aggregate. 

The subdivision of the capital, after all, is a mere mechani- 
cal expedient. It must be temporary. The aggregation of 
capital, the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the more 
skilful, is one of the most elemental tendencies of society. 
The prudent will grow rich, the rich will grow more rich. It 
is, in truth, one of the primary truths about human labour. 
Communism boldly says — Let none grow rich. Co-operation 
simply says — Let more grow rich. After all, how very small is 
the number whom it can permanently make capitalists. All 
cannot grow rich. It is puerile to suppose that all can have 
the advantages of capital ; for if all had them, the advantages 
would cease. Or at least, since they would all share capital 
most unequally, their relative position is not much altered. 
The weak now go to the wall, and so they would if the strong 
had the means of getting stronger. It is easy and most 
desirable that every family in an industrial town should club 
to buy food, and have £20 at interest in the "store." But 
if the entire industry of the country were started on the 
co-operative system, in a generation the shareholders would 
be a small minority, and certain knots of them would doubt- 
less develop the most formidable industrial tyranny which 
modern Europe has seen. 

Hereafter, we are always told, co-operation will develop 
the true plan of admitting labour to a share of the profits. 
It may be ; but no one of the elaborate systems of Socialism 
has stood critical examination. The attempt to apportion 
exactly that share which is the right of labour, and that which 
is the right of capital, has always ended in absurdity. 1 To 

1 See interminable discussions in the Co-operator on this hopeless problem. 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 351 

apply mathematical formulas to social and political questions 
is the surest test of a low education. What arithmetical ratio 
ought property and numbers to hold in government ? What 
is the value of this man's or that class's vote ? Such are the 
crudest of metaphysical puzzles, and the arithmetically just 
share of labour in the profits is one of them. Clearly the 
share, whatever it should be, varies in every trade ; it varies 
in every operation, it varies to each workman. It is a com- 
mon idea that equity would consist in sharing equally between 
labour and capital, every £10 of capital receiving the same 
dividend as every £10 of wages. But why equally? The 
ancient philosopher says "the vulgar think that that which 
is equal is just." But it requires a disquisition on the ele- 
ments of society (which are very differently estimated) to 
show why in abstract justice the £10 of labour expended in 
making a piece of cotton is the fair equivalent of the £10 of 
capital which bought the material and machinery. All that 
can be said is, that it is the market price — the conventional 
measure. But this is the measure of that very industrial 
system which is declared to be so radically unjust. 

Minds that do not delight in these metaphysical will-o'- 
the-wisps will, on reflection, see that there is no more ground 
to say that the just share of labour is half than that it is 
double, or a third, or a tenth. What is the just share of a 
successful general in the plunder? What is the just share 
of the painter of a picture, and the man who wove the can- 
vas and ground the colours? Generals win battles in spite 
of bad soldiers, and soldiers win battles in spite of bad gen- 
erals : what is the share of each in the result ? A capitalist 
of consummate skill makes a business thrive in spite of every 
opposition; a reckless capitalist ruins the most promising 
business. And if labour and capital share equally, what 
becomes of talent, so justly considered in Fourierism? Who 



352 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

is to estimate the share which mechanical genius, instinctive 
sagacity, and personal ascendancy ought to secure for a 
masterly trader? All sorts of ingenious rules have been 
suggested to determine this just share mathematically, and 
each is a fresh absurdity. The whole subject is a quicksand 
which defies measurement. The proportion depends en- 
tirely on the point of view which is taken as most important 
in civilisation. One who values intellectual power will think 
justice gives the larger share to the controlling mind. One 
who is impressed with the importance of capital will award 
it to property. And he who sympathises with the sufferings 
and privations of manual toil will give it to labour. But it 
is of less importance to consider what proportion of profit 
co-operation will give to labour, because at present in Eng- 
land it does not give any. 

But if we suppose the just relative shares of labour and 
capital fixed by some sort of inspiration, they would not long 
remain just. The proportion must be fixed by some con- 
sideration of the difficulty which there is in finding one or 
other element. In a given undertaking, the relative impor- 
tance of the capital and the labour might be mathematically 
taken as equal, and the proportionate value ascertained. 
But suppose the available labourers doubled in number, or 
the available capital halved. Some regard ought to be taken 
of the new importance of capital, when so many more needed 
it, or there was only half as much of it. But this is only to 
fall back on the old rule of competition, of supply and de- 
mand. £10 worth of labour is only equal to £10 worth of 
capital, at the present market rate ; if wages improved, £10 
worth of labour would become £15 worth of labour, and so 
on. £10 worth of agricultural labour, in Dorsetshire, means 
twenty weeks of good farm-work ; in Yorkshire, it means ten 
weeks; in New Zealand, it means five weeks; in Saxony, it 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 353 

means fifty weeks. Which of these is just ? But £10 repre- 
sents nearly as many ploughs and spades, loaves and coats — 
though not quite — in all. The labourer's wages usually 
fall when he is in distress; his £10 worth of labour may 
become £5, without any fault of his own, and though he work 
still harder. But the £10 in capital never fluctuates so quickly 
or so greatly. That is to say, the share which the system of 
justice gives to the labourer will be least precisely when and 
where he most needs it. Surely this is competition systema- 
tised under the mask of equity ! 

Or, suppose no regard is paid to the difficulty of obtaining 
capital or labour — which, after all, is competition, supply, 
and demand — and it were attempted to apportion, by 
abstract justice, the share of labour and capital — how 
should we proceed? Capital results from saving — that is, 
abstinence. How much abstinence is equivalent to how 
much labour ? And then, what sort of abstinence and what 
sort of labour? Under what conditions, over what period, 
and so forth? The abstinence of a nobleman who saves 
£10,000 a year out of £20,000 is not heroic virtue ; but it is 
a great power, and represents the labour of 300 men for a 
year. The whole thing is a pedant's puzzle. We attempt 
to measure in figures the relative values of labour and capital, 
and we come at once to the old conventional measure — the 
market standard. We adopt it, and we incorporate with our 
system of justice all the injustice of competition, and we 
stereotype all its evils. The noble enthusiasts who taught 
Socialism at least saw this, and they determined to meet it 
by reorganising society, and imposing new conditions on 
property. Each fresh difficulty drove them to fresh safe- 
guards and more' ingenious regulations. The world now 
knows the utter failure of these visions of a society drilled 
like a regiment and tutored like a school. But with all their 

2A 



354 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

errors and their follies, they never thought that the just claims 
of labour could be settled "by algebra." They saw that 
there are but two ways in which labour and capital — 
or say, rather, the human faculties and efforts — can receive 
their proportionate shares: by competition, or by a radical 
revision of the mechanism of the whole social system. 

There is one other consideration (and it is of the utmost 
importance) which co-operators usually overlook. In a 
plain, thriving business — as in the cotton trade before the 
American war, when profits were certain and large — it 
seems a very simple thing to divide the profit equitably. But 
what if there is no profit, or a dead loss ? Under the rule of 
abstract justice, it does not seem quite clear why, if a business 
is working at a dead loss, the very wages should be paid. 
Yet, to give capital its due, however great its losses, it pays 
the market rate of wages to all whom it employs. Now, in 
striking the just balance, something ought to be allowed to 
capital for this liability, since it has to bear all the loss. And 
yet, how is the risk, the chance of dead loss, to be estimated ? 
If any arrangement is devised which is to throw the loss on 
labour, then labour ought to have a voice in the manage- 
ment; and we should have co-operative mills managed not 
only by committees and meetings of shareholders, but joint 
committees and meetings of the shareholders, and their 
workmen and workwomen. But co-operators are not pre- 
pared for this, for this is Socialism, and a distinct invasion 
of the rights of capital. 

Working-men, perhaps, are a little disposed to undervalue 
the constant and enormous losses which capital has to bear. 
How many a business, ultimately thriving, has run at a dead 
loss for years — a loss which, if thrown on the workmen, 
would have brought them to destitution. Now, capital can 
stand these great fluctuations just because it is capital — 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 355 

i.e. a reserve ; but the fluctuations of the labourer's income, 
just because he has only a reserve in rare cases, unsettle and 
derange his daily comfort and his domestic life. These 
losses, when averted, are often averted by the personal 
sagacity and energy of the capitalist, which it is impossible 
to estimate in figures. The whole life and soul of a difficult 
business (as of a difficult campaign) often depends entirely 
on the skill of the chief ; and he would be crippled if he were 
a subordinate manager. There is a great deal more resem- 
blance than is often supposed between a military association 
and an industrial one. The successful direction of combined 
human effort requires very similar conditions, whether the 
activity takes the form of killing an enemy or of making 
steam-engines. It is as illusory to apportion the just share 
of the capitalist to the profits, or to subject his action to his 
subordinates, as it would be to put an army into commission, 
and direct it by a Board and an assembly of common soldiers. 
Nor is the industrial question simply one of money. La- 
bour would not be helped simply by awarding it a new share 
of the profits ; many labourers would use it just as improvi- 
dently and unluckily as they do their present share. The 
main and the just complaint of labour is, not that it has too 
small a share of the profit, but that it is too often exposed 
to the exorbitant power of capital, and the oppressive use of 
that power. All know that there are very many ways in 
which the capitalist can hold the labourer gripped in a crush- 
ing system, whilst remunerating him largely. Some of the 
best paid occupations — that of colliers, coal-whippers, tai- 
lors, and excavators — receive very high wages, although often 
suffering the most systematic oppression. Wages are fre- 
quently enormous where "truck" is a dominant institution: 
the money question is often the least part of it. Nor would 
any system which simply added to wages, and left capital 



356 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

with all its power, do much to establish equity. Justice is 
not done to the unprotected labourer simply by giving him 
more money, if every power and right which capital pos- 
sesses to oppress him is left untouched. The evils which fall 
hardest on labour are — irregular work ; overtime ; exhaust- 
ing, unhealthy, and dangerous work; fluctuations in earn- 
ings, place and hours of work; forfeits; personal, domestic, 
and private oppression; want of leisure, justice, and pro- 
tection. All these, which unionism provides for, co-opera- 
tion leaves untouched ; and as to overwork, rather stimulates 
than reduces it. Co-operation concerns itself solely with the 
re-distribution of capital and its produce. For the employ- 
ment and the duties of capital it has not a word. 

Capital has its beneficent as well as its sinister side. It is 
a power for good far more than for evil ; and if co-operation 
too often forgets the formidable power of aggregate capital, 
whether owned by many or by one, by rich or poor, it too 
often puts out of sight the noble functions which capital in a 
single hand can exert. As the possession of vast and free 
capital in a single skilful hand enables it to be used with a 
concentration, rapidity, and elasticity which no corporate 
capital can enjoy ; so in a conscientious hand it is capable of 
yet more splendid acts of protection, providence, and benefi- 
cence. There is nothing chimerical in such a supposition, 
and nothing degrading to those who benefit by it. It does 
not consist in the giving of money or the distribution of 
patronage. A great, free, and wise capitalist — and Eng- 
land happily can show some of the noblest examples — whose 
mind is devoted to the worthy employment of his power, can 
in countless ways, by advice, help, example, and experience, 
promote the welfare of those about him, raise their material 
comfort, their domestic happiness, their education, their 
health, their whole physical and moral condition; can act 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 357 

almost as a providence on earth, and that by means as hon- 
ourable for them to receive as for him to use. 

Every one knows that some of the largest estates, and some 
very large manufactories in this country, are now successfully 
carried on in a spirit which provides in a very high degree for 
the welfare of all concerned. The feeling of honest pride, 
confidence, and goodwill with which these efforts are met on 
the part of tenants and workmen, is as elevating to them as 
it is to their employers. It would be a perversion of mind 
which could see anything mean in so noble a relation as this. 
It would be preposterous to suppose that the sense of duty 
could be as lively and personal on one side or the other, 
where the capital is owned by a company. No responsible 
manager of a society could feel or venture to show the same 
munificent care for his people that many landlords and many 
manufacturers now do. No association could or would be 
ever voting sums for those benevolent purposes which the 
conscientious capitalist carries out day by day. As little 
could it do so as the Board of Admiralty could inspire the 
sense of sympathy and devotion which binds a captain like 
Nelson to his men. This is a conviction almost as old as 
society itself, which it needs more now than some phrases 
about "Self-Help" and "Mutual Co-operation" to eradicate. 

Socialism, it is true, and still more Communism, did claim 
to substitute for this spirit another as strong, or even stronger. 
But that was by boldly reconstructing the social system, by 
instilling new habits, and instituting a moral education. But 
the bastard Communism — of breaking capital into bits — 
which some advocate as true co-operation, leaves the whole 
force of these sentiments out of sight. It weakens the power 
of capital for good far more than it weakens its power for evil. 
The morality and education of capital it passes by. It sub- 
divides it, but does nothing to elevate it. Right, useful, 



358 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

necessary often, as the principle of association and co-opera- 
tion is, indispensable as it may be as an adjunct and resting 
point, it will still remain as true as ever, that on any large 
scale, and for the highest uses, concentrated and not asso- 
ciated capital will command the greatest practical success, 
and develop the most noble moral features both in employer 
and employed. 1 

It may be asked, is there any need so closely to criticise a 
spontaneous economic movement which has an obvious prac- 
tical value ? Is it necessary again to repeat objections against 
socialism as a system ? The answer is that there is real need 
for it. The co-operative system is so great a success that 
any illusions about it would be very dangerous. It is now 
absorbing men of such high qualities and influence, that if 
not well directed it will prove positively pernicious; and 
especially so, since it is being advocated with such exclusive 
claims and such extravagant language as befits only a new 
social system. The present writer yields to none in his 
warm sympathy and respect for the movement as regards 
the "stores" and associated artificers. He knows and has 
seen how very much good it is doing. But that good is 
wholly dependent on its true limit and use being understood, 
and he has long seen with regret that some of the very best 
leaders and friends of the working classes are throwing them- 

1 It will be seen that no notice is here taken of the system originating 
in Paris, advocated by Mr. Mill, and adopted by Messrs. Briggs and Messrs. 
Crossley, in which a portion of the profits is freely given by the capitalist 
to the labourer, or a share in the capital is made over to him. This, the 
most hopeful fact in our industrial system, the best of all schemes of indus- 
trial improvement, is not co-operation at all. It wants every feature of 
co-operation. It is not self-help by the people, for it is a wise and spon- 
taneous act of munificence from the capitalist. No efforts of the labourers 
can advance its introduction. The capital is not subdivided, but remains 
practically in one hand. The management is not democratic, but remains 
also in one hand. The labourers are not partners and have no control 
for good or evil over the concern. It is the free gift of a bonus to the labourer 
— a wise, a just, and a promising system — but not co-operation (1865). 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 359 

selves exclusively into it, as if it were a new gospel, destined 
to revolutionise the conditions of industry. As applying on 
any large scale to manufacturers, it seems to the writer a 
feeble echo of Socialism, with many of its defects and few of 
its ennobling aims. On this side it is a crude compromise 
between the claims of labour and of capital — the hybrid 
child of Plutonomy and Communism. 

Things which are very good and useful when quite spon- 
taneous, become very bad and noxious when fanned into a 
movement and preached as a revelation. The Temperance 
principle has done good service ; but as a teetotalist fanati- 
cism it does positive harm. It is a most useful thing and a 
most hopeful fact, that many working-men's families should 
have a small saving for a rainy day. But there is no need 
for special exultation that a great many working-men become 
shopkeepers or small employers. And a true friend of labour 
may well listen with dismay and disgust to the appeals of an 
organised propaganda "to save society by making money." 
There exists unluckily a systematic agitation which has 
developed a special cant of its own, by which the working- 
men are beset, the burden of the cry being, Save — econo- 
mise — accumulate — grow rich. "I do beseech you," cries 
a co-operative lecturer, "to unite yourselves together, with 
the determination to benefit yourselves by laying out your 
money to the best advantage." This is but the spirit of a 
thousand addresses, tracts, and articles. There has grown 
up an entire class of professional agitators, from whom 
nothing solid or practical is ever heard but exhortations to 
make money, and hints how to make money quickly. It is 
a good thing to grow rich — honestly and naturally. But to 
preach, implore, and excite men to grow rich is a very bad 
thing. 

It used to be said by them of old time that the love of 



360 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

money was the root of all evil. Foolish as this was, it is 
hardly true that money is the root of all good. I do not 
scruple to say that this is too often the tone of the professional 
propagandist, and that much of his teaching is morally 
debasing. There is not one moral standard for the rich and 
another for the poor. And to teach and preach to the poor 
the paramount duty of getting money is as demoralising as 
to preach it to the rich. A little money, if they come by it 
in natural course, may be useful and essential to their well- 
being; but for them to be always thinking of making a little, 
and then of making that little more; ever to be dealing in 
shares, dividend, or interest ; to believe that by so doing they 
are working out their own "elevation" and their orders' re- 
generation, would be a pitiable self-delusion. For this 
reason there is no modern movement more full of moral 
danger than this. The temperance, the educational, the 
club movement, all have and advocate a definite moral ob- 
ject. The co-operative easily degenerates into the basest 
material end. Material efforts are no less necessary than 
moral efforts, — for the moment are often more so ; but only 
in so far as men recognise and remember their temporary 
and subordinate uses. 

The co-operative advocate will insist that many incidental 
objects, many moral precepts, are invariably united with the 
material aim. It is so, and the movement would be a poor 
one indeed if there were not this union. But co-operation 
must stand or fall by that which is its direct principal pur- 
pose. A material aim is a good, provided it keeps its place. 
And the direct, main, and only accomplished object of co-op- 
eration, as a system, is to make money. This is but slightly 
modified by the incidental aims; and its character is not 
changed by vague appeals to good feeling, by social celebra- 
tions, by devoting 1 per cent out of dividends for education, 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 36 1 

by opening a reading-room, and by subscribing £5 to the 
Co-operator. None of these rest on any defined principle, 
are in the least systematic or generally accepted, or have been 
ever worked up into practical standing rules. They are just 
as compatible in theory with a railway company as with a 
" store." The shareholders of any business, if they were good- 
natured people, would do as much and more. What co-op- 
eration does teach emphatically, consistently, perpetually, 
and ably is how to make a thriving business. It has worked 
out an admirably ingenious and prudent system of rules to 
increase dividends and to reduce expenditure. As a commer- 
cial system, it is a masterpiece of sagacious contrivances, 
and rests in principle on the plainest and most consistent logic. 
By this alone can it claim to be a system. What it has not 
yet done is to produce in twenty years one plain case of labour 
being employed on juster and more favourable principles 
than it is, or indeed on any principles but those of competi- 
tion ; or even to elaborate or suggest any rational scheme for 
employing labour on new conditions, or for placing the use 
of capital on a sounder and higher moral basis. 1 

I A curious proof how little co-operation provides or suggests on the grand 
industrial question of making the use of capital consistent with social obli- 
gations, may be found in the following catechism, printed in the Co-operator, 
as part of a lecture, by its indefatigable editor, Mr. Pitman, the most active 
and most eminent of the co-operative apostles: — 

CO-OPERATIVE CATECHISM. 

II What is your Name? 
"Co-operation. 

" Who gave you this Name? 

"My godfathers and godmothers, the Rochdale Pioneers, by whom I 
was made prudent, provident, and persevering. 

"What did your godfathers ayid godmothers do for you? 

"They did promise and vow three things in my name: First, that I should 
renounce 'the public,' and all its ways, the pomps and vanities of this wicked 
world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh. Secondly, that I should believe 
my own principles. And, Thirdly, that I should act as if I did, by keeping 
down expenses, buying in the cheapest market, and giving no credit without 
ample security. 



362 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

If this is true, working-men will not long trust implicitly in 
a system which however useful is very partial and essentially 
subordinate. They, of all others, know the social conse- 
quences of a systematic spirit of money-making. Co- 
operators are fond of homely proverbs, and they may well 
reflect on the value of a specific which consists "of a hair 
from the dog that bit them." They are also fond of an 
apologue, and may think of one of the most ancient and the 
wisest of all apologues — the immortal fable of the "Belly 
and the members." Would it be a rational remedy for dis- 
order of the digestive system if the members were, not to 
starve, but to parcel out the stomach in bits amongst them ? 
All the social misery which is caused to the workmen by the 
rage of amassing capital is not likely to be extinguished by a 
few hundred thousand workmen becoming small capitalists. 
There is nothing in co-operation per se which is to prevent a 
thriving co-operative company from consisting of the most 
selfish and unscrupulous men on earth. Capitalists by the 
very conditions of human nature will not be day-labourers. 

"Dost thou not think that thou art bound to believe and do as the Rochdale 
Pioneers have promised for thee? 

"Yes, verily: and by the reciprocal help of the shareholders and other 
customers I will; and I heartily thank my northern friends that they have 
called me into this happy condition, through the instrumentality of their 
principles. And I hope to illustrate those principles by continual practice 
unto my life's end. 

"Rehearse the articles of thy belief. 

"I believe that honesty is the best policy; that 'tis a very good world we 
live in, to lend, or to spend, or to give in; but to beg, or to borrow, or get 
a man's own, 'tis the very worst world that ever was known. I believe in 
good weight and measure, in unadulterated articles, in cash payments, and 
in small profits and quick returns. I also believe in the maxim 'live and 
let live'; in free trade; and, in short, that my duty towards my neighbour 
is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would they should do 
unto me. 

" What dost thou chiefly learn in these articles of thy belief? 

"First, I learn the folly of being a slave, when I may be free. Secondly, 
I learn to save my money, as well as earn it. And, Thirdly, I learn how 
best to spend it." 

This is sensible advice with a few copybook saws worthy of a village 
schoolmaster; but it is not a system of social justice, or a system of anything 
(1865). 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 363 

And the fact that 10 per cent of the working-men should 
raise themselves out of their class by ceasing to be labourers 
is an evil rather than a good. The working-man who does 
so is generally no favourable specimen of his order. The 
facilities and taste for this species of rise in life, this displace- 
ment of class, form a very real evil. They are generally 
bought at the price of true moral and mental development. 
Regularity and security of position are the conditions most 
favourable to the welfare and elevation of the working-man, 
not a rage for speculation and visions of possible wealth. 
Let him consider the following words of Comte : — " Gov- 
ernments, whether retrograde or constitutional, have done 
all they could to divert the people from their true social 
function (participation in public life) by affording opportu- 
nities for individuals among them to rise to higher positions. 
The moneyed classes, under the influence of blind routine, 
have lent their aid to this degrading policy by continually 
preaching to the people the necessity of saving: a precept 
which is indeed incumbent on their own class, but not on 
others. Without saving, capital could not be accumulated 
and administered ; it is, therefore, of the highest importance 
that the moneyed classes should be as economical as possible. 
But in other classes, and especially in those dependent on 
fixed wages, parsimonious habits are uncalled for and inju- 
rious ; they lower the character of the labourer, while they do 
little or nothing to improve his physical condition ; and neither 
the working classes nor their teachers should encourage them. 
Both the one and the other will find their truest happiness in 
keeping clear of all practical responsibility, and in allowing 
free play to their mental and moral faculties in public as well 
as private life." 

What, then, are our practical conclusions? They are 
these : that the co-operative system, as applied to the retail 



364 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

of food and clothing, and to small bodies of associated work- 
men, is a most sound, strong, and valuable method of adding 
to the material well-being of the working classes. As such 
it deserves all goodwill and confidence, and undoubtedly has 
a large and bright future of usefulness before it. But co- 
operation, as spreading grand social truths, or as applied to 
large capitals and complex industries — in a word, to Pro- 
duction — has not stood, and will not stand, its ground. As 
a social system, it has developed nothing that is not at once 
crude and vague ; and the earnest spirits amongst the work- 
ing and educated classes (often of some shade of Socialism) 
who support it on this ground, should reflect that it has done 
nothing to grapple with the problems that socialism pro- 
pounds ; that it has done and taught nothing definite, except 
how to buy well and how to save money. As applied to the 
higher manufactures it is doubtless capable, in special cases, 
of a very large measure of success, and may often in the battle 
of labour prove valuable, as a temporary rampart and refuge. 
It will probably always remain side by side with individual 
capital, as a vigorous rival and check. Success, however, 
necessarily alters the character of co-operative manufactures, 
and extinguishes their social purpose by converting the work- 
men into simple shareholders. 

Co-operation is deeply rooted, and may now prosper by 
itself. To fan it into factitious activity may prove a danger- 
ous social nuisance. The Gospel according to Mammon will 
preach itself, and can do without the assistance of philosophers 
and reformers. The working-men and their advisers who are 
really bent on social progress, well know that this comes only 
of a truer civilisation, of a more vigorous morality, of a wider 
education, of a deeper moral tone, of healthier domestic life, 
more temperance, unity, moderation, self-respect amongst 
employed, more sense of duty, more justice, more benevolence 



INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION 365 

amongst employers, more sympathy and unselfishness amongst 
both. Were a higher education of mind and feeling universal 
amongst workmen, they could elevate their own condition 
indefinitely. Were it universal amongst capitalists, they 
would do so spontaneously. Moral and mental education 
then, and a systematic promotion of it, and a power to con- 
centrate and direct opinion, is the one thing truly needful in 
this and in all other social wants. This is the true " self-help 
by the people," and not the making of dividends, and com- 
pound interest on capital. This is the only means by which 
the working classes can elevate themselves, and it is a fraud 
to tell them that co-operation offers them this in any serious 
or regular way. Everything that puts this out of sight, and 
blinds men to its paramount importance, is an evil. It is 
because co-operation seems tending to do so, that the writer 
has criticised it as unreservedly and openly as he has previ- 
ously criticised capital. If co-operation were ever to sup- 
plant, in the interest and hopes of working-men, these other 
and far higher requirements, it would become a real source 
of social demoralisation. In itself it is good, provided it be 
natural, and provided it keep its place. But far other things 
are needful on which co-operation can offer nothing definite, 
or only as a make-weight. These things, co-operators may 
be told, they ought to have done, and not to have left the other 
undone. 



IV 

SOCIAL REMEDIES 

(1885) 

In the year 1884 Mr. Robert Miller of Edinburgh, a retired 
engineer, proposed to hold a public representative enquiry 
into the causes of Industrial Distress and possible remedies. 
He offered £1000 for the expenses of such a Conference 
in London, to embrace politicians, capitalists, statisticians, 
workmen, and delegates from many Unions, Co-operative 
and Industrial Societies, Socialist and Reformers' bodies. 
Together with many Economists, Unionists, and Labour 
Associations we organised a Conference of more than one 
hundred delegates, who met during January 1885 in the 
Prince's Hall under the Presidency of Sir Charles Dilke. 

The question proposed was as follows : — 

Would the more general distribution of Capital or 
Land, or the State management of Capital or Land, 
promote or impair the production of wealth and the 
welfare of the community ? 

A variety of papers were read and discussed by men 
representing nearly all the various forms of Economic and 
Socialist schools, by men as widely separated in opinion as 
were Mr. Arthur J. Balfour and Mr. John Burns, as 
were Lord Brassey and Professor Francis Newman and 
Professor Alfred R. Wallace. 

From the volume entitled The Industrial Remunera- 
tion Conference, which reported all the papers and the 
366 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 367 

discussions, I extract my own address, which embodied the 
views on the Labour problem of our Positivist School 
(1908). 

We have before us two methods proposed for the reor- 
ganisation of the industrial system : — the first, by the more 
general distribution of Capital and of Land ; the second, by 
the State management of Capital and of Land. These two 
plans are in violent contrast with each other. The former 
is merely an extension of the present social system, multiply- 
ing the holders of private property, imposing on private 
property no new checks or duties, proposing nothing sub- 
versive of our ordinary habits, and nothing but what is 
common in many countries in the Old and New World. The 
second plan involves an entire revolution in the social system ; 
it would abolish, or at least recast, the oldest institution of 
civilisation, private property; and it proposes an industrial 
system which probably has never at any time been at work on 
any large scale on the face of the earth. 

But before we can properly consider any large scheme for 
the reorganisation of our industrial system, we must first be 
prepared with at least a general answer to the wider question : 
"Does our industrial system need to be reorganised at all?" 
I shall simply indicate my own answer to this question, and 
shall then consider the two alternative proposals for reform ; 
giving in each case results, conclusions, and general esti- 
mates, the outcome of my own experiences and studies. I 
have now for twenty-five years occupied myself with these 
industrial problems in their various phases, in personal con- 
tact with the movements and their leading exponents or di- 
rectors: trades unions, workmen's clubs, benefit societies, 
co-operation, industrial partnerships, land nationalisation, 
socialism, communism. Time does not permit me to enter 



368 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

into details or systematic review of arguments. I shall seek 
only to lay before the Conference my final conclusions and 
suggestions. 

"Does our industrial system need to be reorganised?" 
or in words which originated this Conference, "Is the present 
manner whereby the products of industry are distributed 
satisfactory?" I cannot myself understand how any one 
who knows what the present manner is, can think that it is 
satisfactory. To me at least it would be enough to condemn 
modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, 
if the permanent condition of industry were to be that which 
we behold, that 90 per cent of the actual producers of wealth 
have no home that they can call their own beyond the end 
of the week ; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room, that 
belongs to them ; have nothing of value of any kind, except 
as much old furniture as will go in a cart; have the pre- 
carious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to 
keep them in health; are housed for the most part in places 
that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so 
narrow a margin from destitution, that a month of bad trade, 
sickness, or unexpected loss, brings them face to face with 
hunger and pauperism. 

In cities, the increasing organisation of factory work 
makes life more and more crowded, and work more and 
more a monotonous routine; in the country, the increasing 
pressure makes rural life continually less free, healthful, 
and cheerful; whilst the prizes and hopes of betterment 
are now reduced to a minimum. This is the normal state 
of the average workman in town or country, to which we 
must add the record of preventable disease, accident, suffer- 
ing, and social oppression with its immense yearly roll of 
death and misery. But below this normal state of the 
average workman, there is found the great band of the 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 369 

destitute outcasts — the camp-followers of the army of 
industry — at least one-tenth of the whole proletarian 
population, whose normal condition is one of sickening 
wretchedness. If this is to be the permanent arrangement 
of modern society, civilisation must be held to bring a curse 
on the great majority of mankind. 

Is the relative area of this extreme misery growing wider 
or smaller? Is the normal state of the average workman 
growing better or worse? Is the general lot of the upper 
ranks of the workmen rising or falling? Taking England 
and our own generation only, I have little doubt that there 
is some improvement in all. The proportion of the utterly 
destitute is distinctly, however slowly, diminishing. The 
average workman, on the whole, has gained in money- 
values a real advance. The fortunate minority of the most 
highly-skilled workmen have gained very considerably. 
The figures arrayed by consummate economists are far 
too complete to be doubted. But then this question is by 
no means settled by figures. After all has been said as to 
the rise of wages, as to the fall of prices, as to the cheapening 
of bread and other necessaries, there comes in a series of 
questions as to housing, as to permanence of employment, 
as to the general conditions of life in cities ever more crowded, 
and in country ever more and more enclosed, as to the 
nature of industry in the sum. These are questions that 
cannot be settled by statistics and comparative tables. It 
is impossible to balance a gain of 2d. on the quartern loaf 
against the growing unhealthiness and discomforts of an 
increasing city. No one can say if another id. per hour 
in wages is the equivalent of increased strain in the industrial 
mill. No one can exactly value all the rush and squeeze 
of modern organised industry against the personal freedom 
of the old unorganised labour. 

26 



370 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

These things one has to judge in the concrete, and my 
own judgment is this: the fortunate minority have gained, 
even in the sum total, at least as much as any other class 
in the community; and they are in the ascendant, in the 
way to gain more, both positively and relatively. This is 
due mainly, I hold, to their trades unions and mutual societies. 
The average majority of workmen have, in the sum total, 
gained a little; but far less than the rich or the middle- 
classes. And that little has been gained at the expense 
of some evils which are hardly compatible with civilisation. 
The destitute residuum is, if relatively diminishing, positively 
increasing in numbers; and, under the pressure of modern 
organised life, is in a condition of appalling barbarism. 
Taking the general condition of the producers of wealth 
as a whole, it is improving, but somewhat slowly, and even 
the improvement is of so moderate a kind, and is accom- 
panied with evils so menacing to society, that the future 
of civilisation itself is at stake. And herein I join hands 
with very much that is said by the earnest men of the genu- 
ine Socialist schools, so far as they point out the evils and 
dangers of our actual system. 

In particular, I heartily sympathise with the critical 
portions of Mr. Henry George's writings, especially in his 
latest work, Social Problems. That book seems to me a 
very powerful, and, in the main, a very just, exposure of 
the evils of our industrial system; though I look on his 
pretended panacea as chimerical and futile. But Mr. 
George, whose genius and courage I cordially admire, has 
introduced one very important consideration. He has 
proved, or rather directed our attention to this, viz., that 
the evils long familiar to all in the industrial system of 
Europe are already in full operation in America and other 
new societies; that they grow up with wonderful rapidity 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 371 

within a generation under conditions utterly different to 
those of Europe; that they are found in primitive com- 
munities, in democratic republics, in societies where virgin 
soil, unbounded liberty, limitless space, social equality, 
and an absence of all traditions, restrictions, or hindrances 
whatever, leave an unorganised crowd of freemen face to 
face with Nature. It is impossible, therefore, to attribute 
these evils to Government, social institutions, laws, or his- 
torical conditions. They are the direct growth of modern 
industrial habits ; and they develop with portentous rapidity 
directly industry finds a field wherein to organise itself, 
even in the most free and the most new of all modern societies. 
Mr. George, I say, has shown us that the evils of our industrial 
system are the direct product of the industrial system itself. 

This spectacle of the growth of free industry in America 
affords a sufficient answer to those who call out for absolute 
freedom from state interference. In the United States we 
have state interference at its minimum, and the freedom 
and independence of the individual citizen at its maximum. 
And this seems precisely the field where industry breeds 
the evils of the industrial system with the greatest rapidity. 
It is here, where the state does the least, and where the 
individual is most independent, that we have colossal acci- 
dents, gigantic frauds, organised plunder, systematic adultera- 
tion, the greatest insecurity of property and of person, and 
commerce fast reducing itself to a science of swindling. 
This should be enough to warn us that it is impossible to 
make an absolute principle of the doctrine of non-inter- 
ference. Where the state can usefully interfere, and where 
it cannot, is for each society a matter to be discovered by 
practical experiment. 

The sticklers for absolute respect for Liberty and Prop- 
erty have not the courage of their doctrines. If they are 



372 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

logical they should ask for the abolition of all legislation 
against truck, dangerous structures or practices, unhealthy 
buildings, oppressive regulations, and fraudulent devices 
of any kind. They ought even to call for the abolition of 
all inspection, all compulsion, all monopolies, and all state 
manufactures, or even regulation of industry in any form. 
Cab-drivers would be free to charge the unwary what they 
pleased ; girls and boys would be ill-used in any way short 
of open violence. The population would grow up a prey to 
small-pox and all infectious diseases; the children would 
be untaught ; salesmen would be free to falsify their weights 
and measures, and to adulterate their goods without check; 
sailors would be drowned, pitmen blown to cinders, and 
trains wrecked entirely at the mercy of certain owners; 
and we should have to forward our own letters, and (why 
not ?) protect our own houses ourselves. 

Society would be dissolved in the name of the sacred rights 
of self-help and property. The limits of age, sex, or special 
industry have no abstract force, apart from convenience. 
If it degrades a man to have state protection, it must degrade 
a woman ; if it is good for a young person of 14 to be under 
compulsion or inspection, it cannot be so evil for a young 
person of 18 or 20 to be so also. If there be any absolute 
doctrine of non-interference, the age of 12, 14, 17, or 21 
cannot override it; nor does a factory girl of 16 differ so 
much from a factory lad of 16, or even of 21. Once show 
a few cases where state control has certainly made industrial 
life a little more human, and checked some forms of misery, 
and the abstract doctrine of non-interference is blown to 
the winds. But cases of successful state control abound 
in all societies, and notably in ours. The rule of caveat 
emptor is perfectly observed only by savages. 

I turn to the first alternative proposal, the more general 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 373 

distribution of capital and land. No one who knows the 
working-man, so to speak, at home, can doubt how great 
an advance in well-being and independence is the possession 
of a little capital, a bit of land, however small. Only those 
who do know him at home can truly judge how great an 
advance it is. The workmen of such cities as Rochdale, 
Halifax, Huddersfield, Leeds, Newcastle, and Oldham, 
where the unions, the co-operative, building, and benefit 
societies are in strong force, are in an altogether different 
world from that of the average town and country labourer, 
who on a Friday night is the owner at most of a few shillings 
and five pounds' worth of old furniture. The co-operative 
societies, with their twenty-six millions sterling of annual 
sales, are only one and the best known of the many agencies. 
The trades unions, with their large reserve funds, and their 
accident, sickness, and out-of-work benefits, are but another 
mode of securing to workmen some of the advantages of 
reserve capital. All the various forms of insurance and 
benefit societies, the land and building societies, do the same. 
The prudent, energetic workman of our northern industrial 
districts, who can afford to take advantage of all the mutual 
benefit associations available to him, may be said to be in 
a position of something like security and comfort. If he 
is sick, out of work, or meets with an accident to himself 
or his tools, he is not forced to pawn his bedding; when 
he is superannuated, he is not driven to the poorhouse; 
when he dies, he is not buried by the parish. He gets 
wholesome food, good clothing, and furniture at wholesale 
prices; he has a good library and club, a night school, and 
an annual holiday; and he comes to be master of a house 
and garden of his own. This is the bright side of the picture ; 
but of how few can it be said to be true ! Perhaps, at the 
most, of 5 per cent of our total working population; and 



374 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

of that 5 per cent almost the whole are factory artisans, 
who alone, by their higher wages and the employment of 
whole families, can afford the needful weekly subscriptions. 

With the rural labourer the story is very different. How 
rare is the case where he owns anything, or has the remotest 
hope of ever owning anything ! Every ordinary misfortune 
of life — sickness, accident, infirmity, old age — to him 
means simply parochial relief, charity, the workhouse. 
He drinks poisonous water, eats bad and adulterated food, 
lives a life without rational amusement, without freedom, 
without hope. Compare the British labourer with the 
peasant owner of France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, or 
America, and he appears to be at the opposite pole of com- 
fort and independence. It would be wasting time to multiply 
proofs that the more general distribution of capital and 
of land does promote the welfare of the labourer. Every 
means which contribute to that end are, in my judgment, 
an unmixed good, whether they take the form of co-opera- 
tion, trades unions, benefit, building, insurance, or joint- 
stock societies, or peasant occupation and holdings. Nay, 
I go much farther, and I insist that until the working-man 
— whether in town or in country — has at least as much 
possessory interest in his home as an average middle-class 
man now has, and until he can count on so much capital, 
or its equivalent, as will keep him (if needs be) from destitu- 
tion for a year at least, the first conditions of civilised industry 
are wanting. 

But the question before us is whether the reorganisation 
of industry and the welfare of the community are to be 
found in a general distribution of capital and land. And 
here we are met by two irresistible facts. The first is, that 
the universal tendency of organised industry, rural or urban, 
is towards the massing, and not the dispersion, of capital. 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 375 

The highly specialised subdivisions of all modern production, 
the increasing use of complex machinery, and the greater 
economy of all aggregate operations, make the massing of 
capital more and more essential to efficient production. 
In America and in new societies, even more than in the old, 
the same causes are at work. Increased concentration of 
capital is an indispensable condition of modern successful 
industry. Even in rural England, where the concentration 
of estates seems almost to have reached a maximum, the 
consolidation of farms goes on; the big industry is driving 
out the little. The ancient controversies as to great and 
little culture of land have now ended in this: that for the 
largest production of cereals and stock and for the highest 
scientific farming the big-scale culture at least is indispens- 
able, even if the ownership be subdivided. 

In urban industry no room is left even for debate. Col- 
lective industry has almost extinguished individual industry. 
Factory production has swallowed up home production; 
the spinning wheel, the hand-loom, the village workshop, 
are now the bows and arrows of modern industry. The 
middleman, the chapman, the small trader, the petty manu- 
facturer, the private banker, the small builder, the village 
store, are every day superseded by big companies, central 
agencies, or big capitalists who are consolidated companies 
and agencies in themselves. In the face of this universal 
law of modern industry, a law the more conspicuous the more 
free and virgin be the field of industry, how idle would it 
be to look for any regeneration of the industrial system 
to a natural dispersion of capital or land ! In the teeth 
of universal tendencies such as these, it is rather unnatural 
to struggle for a revival of the equable distribution of capital 
and land which marks the ruder types of society. 

The second objection is a result of the first. As a fact, 



376 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the possession of capital and of land is reached only by an 
insignificant fraction of the labour population. After all 
has been allowed for the work done by trades unions, co- 
operation, benefit societies, and the like, it touches only 
a fortunate few. Even the most flourishing and progressive 
of these movements hardly advance more rapidly than 
population and the general wealth of the community: in 
other words, they barely hold their own. Trades- unionism 
may now be said to be, as an efficient movement, about 
fifty years old; co-operation is forty years old; most of the 
mutual-benefit movements are in their second or third genera- 
tion. It is time that the enthusiasts of each recognised 
the very narrow limit of their real work. They practically 
affect the fortunate minority alone. Ninety per cent of 
the labour population scarcely feel any direct benefit from 
them. 

Co-operation, in particular, has a melancholy failure to 
acknowledge. Too much has been made of the fact that 
a small fraction of the labouring classes (600,000 or 700,000 
all told) have learned to buy their tea and sugar in economi- 
cal ways at stores and clubs. There is no social millennium 
in this. Co-operation started forty years ago with a mission, 
to revolutionise industry, to abolish the wages system, and 
to produce by associated labour, so that the labourer should 
share in the profit of his labour. Over and over again the 
effort has been made to start true co-operative production, 
all workers sharing the profits. Over and over again it has 
failed. It has been a cruel disappointment to the noble- 
hearted men who forty years ago, and since, have hoped 
that they had found a new social machine, to see these 
hopes ruined by the indomitable force of personal interest 
and the old Adam of industrial selfishness. 

One after another all types of co-operative production 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 377 

worthy of the name have disappeared. Here and there 
a few associated artisans or artists struggle on in a small 
business where capital is hardly needed. In 1883 the united 
profits of all productive societies in the kingdom was less 
than £15,000. This does not count the flour-mills, which 
are merely a form of store for the convenient supply of food. 
What a drop in the ocean of the total earnings of the work- 
ing classes, £500,000,000, is this annual profit of £15,000! 
But co-operative employers usually, like other employers, 
give little but the market rate of wages, and secure the best 
dividends they can. Why should they not? they ask; for 
they are poor men, trying to rise. Why not indeed? Only 
they make it plain that co-operation is simply a name for 
a joint-stock company; and the idea that it is about to 
reorganise modern industry is now an exploded day-dream. 1 
Trades unionism, which I have known intimately for 
twenty-five years, is an even more important and efficient 
engine of industrial improvement, mainly because its in- 
direct influence is at least as great as its direct influence. 
A trades union usually benefits indirectly quite as many 
non-members as members, sometimes perhaps twice as many. 
A powerful trades union often improves the condition of 
the whole trade. But, at the utmost, trades unions sub- 
stantially affect only the minority. Of the twelve millions of 
earners, certainly not one million are in union. In one or 
two of the most skilled trades, the unionists are the majority ; 
but, taking the whole labouring population of these islands, 
the unionists are a mere fraction, the aristocracy of labour. 
Nor is this fraction now relatively growing. Trades-unionism, 
in the sum, is not an advancing movement. 

1 In 1883, the aggregate dividend paid by these productive societies in 
England was under £5000. About £100 was devoted to educational and 
charitable purposes, about twice as much to labour, apart from capital or 
purchases, In 1900 the dividend to workers was £20,545 (1908). 



378 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

In two generations now it has shown itself utterly power- 
less to reach the residuum, or even materially to combine 
the great average mass. In spite of all the creditable efforts 
made by the larger unions, and by the annual congress and 
the like, unionism in its average, and certainly in its lower, 
types tends rather to sectional and class interests; it divides 
trade from trade, members from non-members; and espe- 
cially it accentuates that sinister gulf which separates the 
skilled and well-paid artisan from the unskilled labourer, 
and from the vast destitute residuum. Our industrial 
competition forces these classes into permanent antagonism. 
Unionism too often deepens this antagonism into bitter 
and unsocial war. 1 

It is vain indeed to expect the permanent reorganisation 
of industry from any one of the movements which tend to 
the more general distribution of capital or land ; nor is there 
any reasonable probability that this will come about naturally. 
The steady logic of facts is towards the concentration of 
capital and not its distribution; and all the movements 
for promoting that distribution but touch the topmost layers ; 
they scarcely affect the mass, and do nothing for the lowest 
state of destitution. They leave the general organisation 
of the industrial system exactly as they find it. They do 
almost nothing to moralise it, to infuse into it a new spirit; 
and they distinctly decline to revolutionise the industrial 
system itself. Trades-unionism indeed, the best and by 
far the most powerful of these agencies, is a strongly con- 
servative movement, and depends for its activity on the 
actual industrial system as it is. Compared with the gigantic 
and deep-seated evils of our present society, these various 
schemes for the general distribution of capital are mere 
palliatives, stop-gaps, and insignificant experiments. Nine- 

1 The new unionism and socialism have now much changed this (1908). 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 379 

tenths of our working people, nine-tenths of their wages, 
are hardly affected by them at all. 

I turn to the various proposals for the state management 
of capital and land, that is to say, to the nationalisation 
of the soil, and Communism pure and simple. There is 
nothing particularly new about the proposals of Mr. Henry 
George. In the last century, Thomas Spence, in Newcastle, 
proposed very similar theories, and the Spencean clubs of 
that period were quite as vigorous as the land nationalisa- 
tion societies are now. Mr. George has, however, given 
the discussion a new interest by his eloquence, passion, 
and his experiences of the new societies across the Atlantic. 
I have already expressed my admiration of Mr. George's 
genius and energy. And I will add this: his dealing with 
the land question has drawn attention to some important 
truths, so valuable that if all the rest of his arguments were 
worthless, this would still make him one of the most vigorous 
social thinkers of our time. 

The greater part of his criticism of our present distribu- 
tion of wealth is right in principle, even if exaggerated in 
statement. He has abundantly proved that it is not due 
to any special conditions of English society, law, or institu- 
tions. He has thrown fresh light on the danger of permitting 
to the owners of the soil in cities the absolute disposal of its 
surface and the buildings on it. And in particular he has 
done admirable service in insisting on the necessity for a 
genuine land tax. I am prepared myself to go with him 
so far as to see a fifth at least of our national income raised 
by a tax on land and ground-rents, as is usual in most other 
civilised communities. But all these proposals are part of 
the accepted programme of all radical reforms. And 
Mr. George has done nothing to put them into practical 
and workable form. 



380 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

When, however, he goes on to represent the appropriation 
of the soil in private hands as the cause of all social misery, 
and the state confiscation of the soil as the panacea for 
every ill that afflicts society or the working poor, no wilder 
sophism was ever uttered by a sane man. I will not, in a 
serious gathering of cultivated men, waste a word on his 
invocations to the will of God or the rights of man. Rant 
of this kind is more fitting to a negro camp-meeting than to 
an industrial enquiry. I come at once to what I hold to 
be the central error of all land nationalisation theories what- 
ever. It is assumed in all — 

(1) That property in land is something different toto 
ccelo from any other kind of property. 

(2) That property in land represents a mere legal right, 
nothing of real value apart from its arbitrary and fictitious 
value. 

(3) That property in land retains its value without any 
act or expenditure on the part of the owner. 

(4) That there is some mysterious wickedness about 
ownership of the soil, some social mischief which is not 
at all shared in by mere permanent occupation of the soil. 

Every one of these assumptions is false. The appro- 
priation of the soil rests on precisely the same grounds as 
any other appropriation. If there is anything wicked and 
socially mischievous in private property in land, the same 
wickedness and mischief exist in any other private property. 
The former is the appropriation of an immovable and the 
latter of a movable; but there the distinction ends. There 
are things far more rare than the soil, and quite as essential 
to human life. The appropriation of all the salt in India, 
or of all the coal or wood in England, would create a mo- 
nopoly far more formidable, and would sooner make the 
monopolist master of the community than any possible 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 38 1 

appropriation of the soil. Raffaelle's pictures and ancient 
statues are far more rare than even the soil of these islands. 
And fuel, ships, or iron are quite as necessary to existence. 

If property becomes sin, when extended to things of which 
the supply is limited, the ownership of diamonds, coal, 
antiquities, and ancient manuscripts must be even more 
unholy. To lay down a social law that no one shall own 
anything which is much wanted by others, would apply in 
turn to almost every subject of property. Food, building 
materials, horses, minerals, even books and newspapers, 
become in certain societies and under certain conditions, 
things of special desire, and suddenly enrich the fortunate 
owners. The unearned increment applies to everything 
in turn. The window of an attic which commands the 
view of some historical scene, the house in which Shakespeare 
lived and died, the Times newspaper with the account of 
the battle of Waterloo, suddenly become a fortune in the 
hands of some lucky owner. It is as much or as little criminal 
to own them as to own a bit of soil. If rarity and a general 
desire to possess them make things incapable of appropria- 
tion, the rule should apply to thousands of things besides land. 

Immense nonsense is afloat respecting "the unearned 
increment." The unearned increment is the result of 
civilised society which gives special value to various things, 
quite apart from any act of their possessors. In a besieged 
city, the fortunate holders of food, in a war, the possessors 
of ships, saltpetre, guns, and the like, suddenly find that 
their property has "an unearned increment." The buyers 
of the first edition of the Modern Painters, Turner's Liber 
Studiorum, or Tennyson's poems, are in the same case. 
Those who have bought a piece of land in a spot where 
a town begins to rise are in precisely the same position. 
It may be quite right for the state to prevent the possessors 



382 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

of the soil from hindering the free development of the town. 
But why should the state confiscate the "unearned incre- 
ment" of the piece of ground, and not the "unearned in- 
crement" of the book, the grain, or the saltpetre? 

Nor is it true that land is a positively limited thing. 
There are still boundless tracts on the earth's surface not 
actually occupied. Land is in no sense so limited as wood, 
iron, coal, salt, not to speak of Greek statues and illuminated 
manuscripts. And in each country, even in ours, the quantity 
of cultivated and useful land is a constantly fluctuating 
amount. The land in practical occupation is now probably 
one-fifth more than it was fifty years ago; and perhaps 
one-twentieth less than it was ten years ago. The land 
of any country in actual occupation varies from year to 
year very largely, far more than iron, coal, wood, or old 
books and pictures vary in amount. At this hour, there 
are millions of acres of the soil of these islands which are 
perfectly at the service of Mr. George and his friends, at 
a rental of is. an acre, if he likes to lease them, and to convert 
them into good farms. It is untrue that the soil even of 
this island is all allotted out and closed for ever. There 
are millions of acres still to be had which might be made 
perfectly serviceable to man at an outlay of so much per 
acre. What is lacking is the capital or the labour willing 
to convert them. For practical men well know that to con- 
vert these waste lands into farms would involve a ruinous 
loss. It would not pay one per cent. Why, then, should 
the "state" be required to make an outlay which is certain 
to prove a ruinous loss? 

This brings us to the point that property in the soil rep- 
resents not a bare legal right to exclude others, but the 
actual expenditure of capital and labour. The underlying 
fallacy of Mr, George is to think that land is a thing like 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 383 

the sea, and raising produce from it is a simple process, 
like catching fish. There are exceptional cases and extreme 
limits. But an ordinary farm is as much artificial as a house 
or a factory. Good farm land in England is the work of 
enormous outlay and labour. In its primitive condition 
it was moor, swamp, thicket, or sandy wilderness. Perhaps 
not a twentieth part of this island in its original state (Mr. 
George would say as God made it) was of any use at all to 
man. There is hardly an acre of cultivated land in England 
which has not been made cultivable by a great outlay of 
labour and capital. It has really been as much built up as 
a railway or a dock. Immense tracts of fine farm land 
have been in this very century slowly won from a state of 
barren wilderness by continuous labour and the enormous 
expenditure of capital. The whole of the corn lands recently 
gained from the open down and moor, forming large parts 
of eight or ten southern and south-western counties, the vast 
and fertile regions in Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and 
other North-Eastern counties, redeemed from saltmarsh, 
fen, and swamp, have been made quite as completely by 
human industry as a ship or a steam-engine. 

It is idle to repeat sophistical platitudes that God made 
the earth, but man made the ship or the engine. The ship 
and the engine are merely materials found on and in the 
earth, worked into useful forms, and arranged by human 
industry to serve man's wants. So is a farm. No farm 
in England is in the state in which it is supposed that God 
left it at the creation of the earth. It has been worked up 
and rearranged by human labour extending over centuries. 
The farm is also, like the ship or the engine, a mass of the 
earth's materials so changed and placed that it can grow 
food. Apart from that labour, an acre, say, in the Bedford 
Level, or on the Wiltshire Downs, would be as perfectly 



384 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

worthless as an acre on the top of Snowdon or on the Good- 
win Sands. It is certainly immovable, whilst an engine 
or a ship, under conditions, and with great expense and 
labour, is movable. But this is a mere incident. A ship 
stranded is also immovable; and so is an engine, in the 
absence of capital to move it. 

Hence we find that large portions of the soil of England 
have every quality possessed by other purely personal prop- 
erty, which Mr. George does not propose to touch. Even 
he would be scandalised at a proposal to confiscate the ships 
and engines built and owned by private persons, on the 
ground that their material was simply a portion of the earth's 
soil, which no man has a right to appropriate. Society 
judges it wise to guarantee property in ships and engines 
to those whose capital has procured them to be built, in order 
to encourage citizens to employ their savings in a way useful 
to the community. On precisely the same grounds it guar- 
antees property in the Bedford Level to those whose capital 
has procured it to be made. 

The Bedford Level is no doubt an extreme case. But 
it is only a matter of degree. Hundreds of thousands of 
acres in England have been made by human toil, skill, 
and capital, quite as completely as the Bedford Level was 
made out of tidal swamps. To a very great degree every 
cultivated acre in England has also been so made. Clearing 
of timber and brushwood, of stones, weeds, and other 
growths, draining, fencing, damming, bridging, making 
roads, barns, farmsteads and the like, ponds, wells, water- 
courses, and the hundreds of works without which the land 
could not bear produce — these costly operations were 
necessary for every farm alike. If the people, by God's 
law, have a right to God's earth, they can only have a right 
to that earth in the state in which God created it. 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 385 

Let us assume that Mr. George is right, and that we agree 
to hand back the soil to the people. It would be grossly 
unjust to hand it back to them in any other state than a 
state of nature. Assume that we could replace it in that 
state, in the state, say, in which Julius Caesar saw it when 
he came over from Gaul. This island then consisted of 
pathless tracts of jungle, fen, moor, wood, and heath. The 
valleys of the great rivers were periodically under water; 
the estuaries on the coast were boundless salt fens; the up- 
lands were sandy or stony wildernesses; there were only 
two or three varieties of tree; four or five very common 
herbs; and about as many coarse wild fruits. It would 
be impossible for any but hunters and coracle boatmen to 
get about the country; there would be hardly any food for 
man or cattle; neither man nor beast could live anywhere 
except on patches here and there, mostly in aquatic villages 
or on detached and stony hills. At the utmost, one-twentieth 
of the soil could be used for human produce, and that only 
in the rudest way for a few necessaries. Nineteen-twentieths 
of the soil would be as absolutely useless for human food 
as Dartmoor and the Wash are now. That is the condition 
in which God gave the soil of England to the people of 
England; and that is the condition in which they should, 
by God's law, receive it back. 

To seize it, after centuries and centuries of labour have 
been, by man's law, expended in utterly changing its very 
face and nature, would be monstrously unjust. We have 
lately by legislation remedied what most of us hold to be 
a cruel injustice to Ireland, where the labour which A had 
put into the soil was confiscated by B. In Ireland, the 
mountain-side and the bog had often been won into culti- 
vation and usefulness by the incessant labour of some tenant, 
or perhaps squatter or bare occupant. Mr. George has 



386 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

justly inveighed against the outrageous injustice done, when 
the farm so reclaimed by the labour and capital of the peas- 
ant was claimed, plus its improvements, by the mere owner 
of the soil. We heartily agree with him. On what ground ? 
Because we find it unjust that the men who may fairly claim 
the soil should plunder, along with the soil, the visible result 
of another's labour and capital. In England it is not the 
occupant but the owner, or those whom the owner repre- 
sents, who have expended on the soil that labour which alone 
has made it useful to man. Mr. George, therefore, is going 
to do in England exactly what he and we find so monstrous 
in Ireland. Granted that the soil of England belongs to the 
people of England. Then he is calling on the people of 
England not only to seize the soil, but to confiscate the enor- 
mous wealth representing the outlay by which the soil has 
been transformed. He is going on a colossal scale to repeat 
the injustice which in a very minor form we have just re- 
dressed by legislation. 

Some schools of land nationalisation propose what they 
call compensation on this confiscation. What they pro- 
pose is, however, no compensation at all. It is not, and 
never can be, any kind of equivalent for the capital expended. 
The strict prairie value of agricultural land in England 
would hardly amount to one year's rent. The improved 
value, representing capital expended in making the prairie 
cultivable, would usually exceed twenty years' rent. It 
may be doubted if £2,000,000,000 would go any way in 
making the soil of England what it is to-day, supposing 
that it were in the state in which Julius Caesar, or even 
William the Conqueror, found it. The idea that the owners 
of the soil simply represent a parchment-right granted ages 
ago by some sovereign or paramount authority is almost 
too ridiculous to discuss. 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 387 

There is perhaps not a single enclosed and cultivated acre 
in England on which human labour has not been expended 
and paid for far in excess of many years' rent; it would be 
easy to show that in some spots forty, fifty, even a hundred 
years' rental would not cover the loss and outlay sunk in 
making it fertile. We ought to calculate, not merely the 
bare clearing, draining, and enclosing the particular farm, 
but the whole of the permanent works needed to make any 
given district cultivable as it now is — the vast and ancient 
operations of dyking rivers, estuaries, and watercourses, 
the road-making, bridge-making, and planting, the sum 
of those labours which make an English county so utterly 
unlike the same soil in the days of the Heptarchy. 1 It is 
as great a difference as that between a frockcoat and a sheep's 
fleece. Mr. George might as well claim the coats off our 
backs, on the ground that God made the sheep, as the farms 
which have been made by human capital and skill. 

It is idle to seek now to unravel all the titles to every plot 
in England. The notion that the soil of England is held 
to-day under grants made by Norman and Tudor kings is 
obviously childish. It would be easy to show that an im- 
mense proportion of it is now held by the assigns of those 
who paid hard money or money's worth for it. Somebody 
gave or paid for the labour ; and it would be as idle to trace 
back the heirs of the original labourers as it would be to 
find the men who made our coats, or the heirs of the brick- 
layers who laid the walls of our houses. In civilised so- 
ciety the legal ownership of an article is assumed to represent 
the value given for the labour expended on it. If every man 

1 The works here spoken of are all the beneficial constructions for the 
permanent improvement of the soil, made at the cost of successive owners 
of the land. It does not include high roads, bridges, or other works paid 
for by the parish, the county, or any public body. Every one knows that 
in every large property there are occupation roads, bridges, dykes, and other 
works necessarily paid for by the proprietor. 



$88 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

were liable to have his coat confiscated off his back, unless 
he could show that he had paid his tailor, that the tailor 
had paid the clothier, that the clothier had paid the farmer, 
that the farmer had paid the shepherd, and so on ad infini- 
tum, civilised society would cease to exist. There is no 
more reason in land than in anything else for calling on the 
legal owner to show that he has personally paid the value 
expended in making the article, be the article coat or farm. 
As a matter of fact, a very large part of the soil of England 
has been acquired for value given within recent generations. 

Even the estates of our peers, whose Norman names 
excite Mr. George's democratic sensibilities, have usually 
been acquired, directly or indirectly, through purchases by 
capitalists or marriage with the children of capitalists. It 
was amusing to read Mr. George's denunciations of the 
London estate of the Duke of Westminster, which he told 
us was a grant from a Norman king. Everybody knows 
that it comes by inheritance from a worthy yeoman, who 
farmed his own estate, and left it in due course to his grand- 
child. The grandchild's descendant about a hundred years 
ago obtained a title. But the right of the Duke to the soil 
is precisely the same as Mr. George's right to anything 
which was left to him by his grandfather. There are no 
Norman kings in America, and no land-laws made by an 
aristocracy. And yet precisely the same evils of land 
monopoly exist there, we are told, and the same policy of 
confiscation is recommended. 

Who are the people of England to whom God gave the 
soil? Are they the descendants of the aborigines, of the 
first occupants, of the Britons, Saxons, or the mediaeval 
yeomen? Have not the Welsh, the men of Cornwall, the 
Highlands, and the West of Ireland the best title to the soil 
of their ancestors? And in America God certainly gave 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 389 

the soil to the red-skin; and by the law of divine justice 
one would think that New York, Boston, and Chicago should 
be restored to the remnant still left in the Indian reserves. 
Absurd panaceas can only be properly exposed by pointing 
out the absurd consequences which logically they involve. 

Not only does the owner of a farm represent those who 
have expended capital in creating it, but the farm would 
soon cease to exist if the owner did not continue to expend 
capital in keeping it going. Next to the fallacy that the 
landlord has done nothing to make the land, comes the 
fallacy that he does nothing to maintain it. An ordinary 
estate requires periodical expenditure, amounting at the 
lowest to 10 per cent of the rental, often twice, thrice, or 
four times as much. Official reports from one of the great 
estates in the kingdom show that in sixteen years nearly 
three-quarters of a million sterling has been expended. 
Of late years much of this outlay has been incurred along 
with a reduction of rents. It may well be that much of 
this expenditure is in permanent improvements which will 
ultimately represent increased value. But in England an 
immense proportion of this expenditure has nothing to do 
with profit or speculation. It is voluntarily made by the 
duty or pride of ownership, just as parks and gardens are 
kept up without any view to profit. 

Farmhouses, farm buildings, cottages, schools, churches, 
clearings, plantations, and model farms are placed on the 
soil by rich landlords out of their capital. The country 
gains largely by this; and the reason that so many parts 
of England are cultivated like gardens or home farms is 
that the owners, having immense capital from resources 
other than agricultural rents, are able to indulge their pride 
or their sense of duty by expending enormous sums in improv- 
ing and beautifying their estates. One landlord in 16 years 



390 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

spent in farms, cottages, etc., £290,000. Another, in 3 
years, £60,000. Another, in 17 years, £30,000 (rental re- 
duced). Another has, in 10 years, received £50,000, out 
of which he spent on the land £43,000 without increased 
rental. These improvements are all in country estates, 
and in different counties. 1 Instead of the great peers carry- 
ing off the rentals of their farms to be consumed in extrava- 
gance, the farms are often kept in their present high condi- 
tion because vast sums acquired elsewhere are poured into 
them. I am certainly not prepared to utter one word in 
defence either of our landed system or of our concentration 
of land in a few hands, least of all in defence of the unsocial 
extravagance of the rich. But on the whole I believe that 
great landlords in England administer their estates with 
more sense of public duty than bankers or merchants em- 
ploy their capital. 

On the whole I estimate that an annual sum of at least 
ten millions is needed to keep our agricultural land at a 
high level of condition, in building, draining, fencing, clear- 
ing, planting, in roads, dykes, watercourses, bridges, and 
so forth. In a country changing so rapidly as ours, and 
with daily advances in scientific farming, this outlay is 
required to keep abreast of the general progress. Were 
this not expended the fertility of the land would rapidly 

1 These cases have been given to me privately, and in each case with 
exact figures supplied from the agent's office. They belong to a large 
class of English properties which are owned by men of great wealth and 
managed on liberal principles, without any idea of exacting the maximum 
rental. They are not at all the strongest cases to be found. The entire 
rental of some large estates is expended on the property. I know myself 
of two properties owned by millionaires, one of £13,000, the other £4000 
a year, from which for years past no income has been taken off the land. 
I cite these cases not to claim any merit for the owners, nor as a defence 
of the landlord system, but to prove a plain economic fact, viz., that a large 
proportion of the estates in England are managed without any reference 
to pecuniary profit, and that immense sums are, as a fact, annually spent 
in improving the land by the owners. The question whence that money 
comes is a perfectly distinct issue. 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 391 

deteriorate and ultimately cease altogether. Any large 
tract of ordinary country left to itself for a generation would 
return to a state of nature, and in two or three generations it 
would be as uncultivable and as uninhabitable as the moor 
or the fen of our ancestors. An ordinary estate requires 
a continual expenditure of capital to keep it going, just as 
a ship, or a railway, or a cotton-mill. 

The sole justification of ownership of the soil is that this 
is done by the owner. In England it is done by the owner, 
and, on the whole, done well. It is well done mainly be- 
cause the soil of England is owned by men, very many of 
whom are rich apart from their rentals from farms. If an 
annual outlay of ten millions be taken (for illustration) as 
the amount required to keep our agricultural land in a high 
state of productiveness, I shall assume that no less than 
fifteen millions are annually expended on it now, if we in- 
clude every kind of outlay — churches, schools, cottages, 
model farms, houses, gardens, plantations, of every kind: 
in fact, all that is not accomplished by public taxation. 

Where is this ten or fifteen millions annually to come 
from if the state confiscates the soil? To throw it on the 
occupant or farmer is to overburden him, already unable 
as he is to stock or work his farm from want of capital. He 
will have, as now, to pay his rent or land tax to the state. 
Otherwise the state will derive no benefit from confiscation, 
and will simply make a present of the land to the farmers. 
But if the farmer, besides paying his rent, is to find the annual 
outlay for repairs and improvements, none but capitalists, 
or the nominees of capitalists, will be able to farm. Hence, 
the ten or fifteen millions must come either from the state 
or from land banks. If from the state, then a large slice 
of the state's new land tax will be cut off. And what a 
prospect of state intervention, jobbery, and mismanage- 



392 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

ment is unfolded by a scheme which puts every farm under 
the direct management of the state; which substitutes for 
all the land agents and landlords in England a huge depart- 
ment at Whitehall which would have to give an order before 
any gate, barn, or ditch in the kingdom could be repaired. 

It has been suggested that the difficulty is met by leasing 
the state land at a lower rate. This does not meet the case. 
In the first place, the state will have to see that the sums 
required for improvements are actually expended. That 
would involve minute and constant inspection, followed by 
eviction in case of default. What an endless source of dis- 
content such a system involves ! Again, a large part of the 
expenditure now made by great landlords is far in excess 
of what a public department could or would exact from 
farmers with small capital. Yet if that expenditure is sacri- 
ficed the country, at any rate the land, would be the loser. 
Lastly, a large, irregular, and occasional expenditure, which 
is easily borne by a great capitalist, is not so readily met by 
a farmer without capital. A farmer, now paying £200 a 
year rental, needs, we may suppose, a new house, buildings, 
and appurtenances, to cost ^2000. A landlord easily finds 
that sum. It is a very different thing to call on the farmer 
to find it, even if his rent be reduced from £200 to £100 per 
annum. The seamen who navigate an ocean steamer could 
not find the capital to work it, even if their wages were £500 
a year. 

Suppose, on the other hand, that the state declines so 
gigantic and so unpopular a task, and that the ten or fifteen 
millions are found by financial corporations — land banks 
of some kind. That is to institute a vast system of mortgage 
over the face of our country. Mortgages are bad enough 
when created by a landlord; they are far more ruinous 
when the farmer or peasant is indebted. The state would 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 393 

be the mere over-lord, receiving the true rent under the 
name of land tax, as in India or Egypt; and the cultivator 
— call him peasant, farmer, or lessee — would be the bond- 
slave of some money-dealer, who would be his mortgagee 
and practical master. The place of landlord would be 
taken by some banking company in London. 

This is what happens always where the cultivator is with- 
out capital, and yet where he has himself to find the sums 
periodically needed to keep his land in condition. This 
is why the Egyptian fellah, the Indian ryot, the peasant in 
Russia and Eastern Europe generally, is the bond-slave 
of the money-lender. Even in France, Belgium, or America, 
where the peasant has unusual qualities of industry and 
thrift, the poorer class of farmers are bowed down by mort- 
gages and loans. How could it be otherwise? No magic 
will get rid of the need for constant outlay to keep the land 
in condition ; nor will any magic supply the small farmer — 
call him what you will — with the capital needed. At 
present he can hardly buy his stock and implements. How 
is he to find, then, ten or fifteen millions more, if we abolish 
the landowner, who now finds this sum? He can only find 
it by borrowing; and the lender will be more or less master 
of him and of his land. 

Suppose that, by a short Act of Parliament, the payment 
of rent were abolished, within a generation the present farm- 
ers, who, as a rule, have neither large capital, nor the habit 
of accumulating a large capital, would be deeply in debt 
for the sums required to renew buildings and develop culti- 
vation. Where there is need for continual outlay of capital, 
borrowing is the only means by which a class without capital 
can meet that outlay, however easy be the terms on which 
the holders may get the land. The land question is a ques- 
tion of capital. No legislation can create capital where it 



394 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

does not exist, and where the habit of accumulating does 
not exist. But the nationalisation scheme does not pretend 
to abolish rent. It only converts rent into land-tax; that 
is, it changes the persons to whom rent is payable. The 
landowner system is a device for getting capital on to the 
land. If we abolish the landowner, then, as the farmer has 
not adequate capital, it must come either from the state 
or from lenders. 

The English schools of land nationalisation usually pro- 
claim as their aim the formation of a number of small farms 
leased from the state, with fixity of tenure — in fact, the 
legislative creation of a system of permanent peasant occu- 
pation. There are great social advantages in peasant pro- 
prietorship, and in any system where the actual cultivator is 
in free possession of the soil he tills. I am wholly convinced 
that to occupying ownership, without legal limitation on 
the extent of the holding, we must ultimately come. But 
the questions before us are these : First, can we create such 
a system at a stroke by legislative compulsion? Secondly, 
in order to do so, need we start with such a tremendous 
revolution as abolishing property in land? Thirdly, when 
we had done it, would the advantages (apart from the dan- 
gers and evils) be at all commensurate? To these three 
questions I answer, No ! 

If every rural labourer in England were suddenly by law 
declared the absolute owner of ten acres, other conditions 
remaining unchanged, within a few years the productiveness 
of the soil would be reduced by one-half, and in a few genera- 
tions large properties would be again the rule, and the bulk 
of the labourers would be in a state of dependence. It is 
impossible, in a country like ours, to force society back into 
the primitive simplicity of Switzerland and Norway, even 
if it were desirable. It is useless to make peasant proprie- 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 



395 



tors or independent farmers by law, until both have the 
habits and the capital needed to work such farms or holdings 
to a profit. Then, when we had "planted our people on 
the land," we should at most have provided for one million 
of earners out of our twelve millions of earners, for if the 
holdings were too small, production would be arrested. 
How should we have improved the condition of the other 
eleven millions of earners? To hope that we should have 
abolished wages, even in agriculture, is an illusion. There 
is not a country in the world where the wage-receivers do 
not exceed the proprietors tilling their own land. And in 
a system of peasant ownership the wage -receivers are often 
worse off than elsewhere. 

If our soil is to be well cultivated, the lots — call them 
farms, properties, or holdings — could not, at the outside, 
exceed a million, and would probably be quite small enough 
if they amounted to half or a quarter of a million. If these 
lots are to be well tilled, some one must have full control 
over each, call him peasant, farmer, owner, lessee, or occu- 
pant. Unless such occupant has permanent tenure, with 
full power to transmit to his assigns and successors, he will 
not put capital into the land. Unless he has capital of his 
own he must borrow it. When he is a systematic borrower 
he will cease to be a free proprietor. And when financial 
rings hold under mortgages the soil of England, we shall 
simply have established for the landlords whom we see, 
and who (in England) live on their estates and usually take 
some pride in them, invisible money-dealers living in dis- 
tant cities. What is there in all this to transform industry, 
reorganise our social system, and offer a millennium to the 
thirty-five millions of these islands? 

Our English schools of land nationalisation adopt the 
principle merely in name. Mr. George proposes a genuine 



396 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Communism, so far as land is concerned. If his scheme is 
to have the grand social results which he claims, he must 
abolish all property in the soil as an institution. It is, ac- 
cording to him, from the sinful institution whereby plots 
of God's earth are nefariously allotted to private persons in 
full control that poverty, bad trade, rotten finance, injustice, 
fraud, and even prostitution, spring. But the practical 
result of our English land nationalisation movement is, not 
to abolish, but greatly to strengthen this malignant institu- 
tion, the appropriation of the soil. The English schools 
seek to make many more persons the virtual masters of the 
soil. Nationalisation, in their mouths, is reduced to a phrase. 
The state is to be declared sole proprietor. Well, that is 
nothing; such is now the law of the land, a law acted on 
daily, when land is taken under the compulsory powers of a 
thousand Acts of Parliament. But names apart, the new 
allottees of the farms or plots will be quite as much proprie- 
tors, in the anti-social sense of the term, as the Norman 
barons who now own them. 

Unless the allottees have permanent occupation, with 
fixity of tenure, and freedom to transfer, charge, and devise 
them, the land cannot be properly worked. Some persons 
or other, by a law of nature, physical nature and human 
nature alike, must have full control over the soil, unless it 
is to waste and go to ruin as land does in Turkey or Persia. 
But permanent occupation, with fixity of tenure and free- 
dom of assignment, is proprietorship in other words. It 
will exercise over society all the same effects. The new 
allottees will accumulate estates, and in a few generations 
will be just as selfish, tyrannical, and indolent as the Norman 
barons. They will be just as much the enemies of the 
human race. Why not? We shall have changed the per- 
sons of the proprietors; but how shall we have changed the 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 397 

proprietor nature? Instead of Lord Wolverton, a London 
banker, or Lord Ardilaun, a Dublin brewer, who care little 
for the rentals of farms, we should have got a dozen small 
capitalists who had saved money in iron, and a dozen more 
who had prospered in coal, butter, or mutton, and who are 
not likely to be easier landlords. 1 

In what I have said I do not by one word accept the actual 
land system as satisfactory, or our present social condition 
as tolerable. I am as eager as any Socialist to transform 
our landlordism as a permanent institution and to find a 
higher standard for our general industrial life. I see certain 
great advantages, chiefly economical and material, in our 
present system of landed estates; but I am very far from 
believing that these counterbalance its grave social evils. 
But these are to be dealt with, I hold, by the class of measures 
long advocated by all schools of radical land reformers. 
I am as anxious as any man to see a large body of peasant 
holdings freely springing up on our land. I look for a large 
body of working farmers, with permanent interest and com- 
plete freedom in their own farms. And I see social and 
moral evils of the worst kind in any system which practically 
severs (as ours does) the ownership of the soil from any 
responsibility to superintend its cultivation. That is to say, 
there are grave evils to society where estates in the mass 
are simply leased or loaned for hire like money. These 
evils, however, can be remedied by a reform of the land 
laws, by abolishing all the legal and social privileges peculiar 

1 In Professor Newman's paper, "written on behalf of the Land Na- 
tionalisation Society," he says: "The aim of our society is to establish 
a state of things in which small independent plots of land shall be procurable 
everywhere." As the aim to be reached, he speaks of farms "being multi- 
plied through peasant freeholds." Now to maintain such a system in 
England, even if it could be created by law, two things are absolutely neces- 
sary — (i) limitation by law of the size of holdings, (2) prohibition against 
sub-letting. Both of these conditions are impossible. To attempt them 
would lead to an unendurable tyranny. 



398 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

to the ownership of land, and by a resolute scheme of land 
taxation. 

Under such a system of reform it would simply not pay 
to be the nominal owner of a great estate. A great estate 
would become a mere burden, and not a very honourable 
one, except where a man of vast wealth might choose to 
devote a large part of it to the public service, by keeping 
up an estate without profit. However, after all the changes, 
I am not sure that the tillers of the soil will be, in material 
conditions, quite as well off as many are now who hold under 
the great Bedford, Devonshire, Portland, Buccleuch, and 
Northumberland estates. But, on the whole, the social 
objections to the maintenance of an indebted, idle, and 
exclusive squirearchy are so serious, that we should by every 
legal obstacle limit the formation of a landlord class whose 
social function is sport, and whose economic function is to 
spend what rent remains after keeping the estate in produc- 
tive efficiency. Economically speaking, there is some social 
justification for dukes and millionaires as landlords, for 
they sometimes put almost as much on to the land as they 
draw off, and they offer types of high agricultural efficiency. 
It is the squireen, with one or two thousand acres, with no 
capital, no occupation, and few useful faculties, who is with- 
out any raison d'etre; being, like his own cherished fox, 
a survival of the unfittest in modern civilisation. 

In what I have said I strictly limit myself to England, 
and to rural estates. If the system cannot be applied to 
English farms it fails altogether. The social and economical 
conditions of the greater part of Ireland, and even of Scot- 
land, are so very different; the social justification of the 
landlord there is so much less even when it exists at all, 
that very different reasoning applies to the ill-managed 
territories of so many Irish and Scotch absentee landlords. 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 399 

I also have been speaking exclusively of the soil in country, 
not in cities. I am quite prepared to see the state, through 
local authorities, assert in towns a permanent right to control 
the disposition of the soil in such ways as experience shall 
prove to be most useful to the public. Abstract rights of 
property should no more be an obstacle to laying out our 
cities as health and convenience suggest, than they are now 
in making a railway through an estate. What we want 
are a set of Lands Clauses Acts applying to any soil in towns, 
and vesting control over it in proper local authorities. And 
we shall want very stringent provisions to check owners 
from doing anything contrary to public interests, or from 
receiving fanciful compensation for their own laches and 
obstruction. 

Even then we ought to see more wisdom and honesty in 
local authorities before we can confidently entrust to them 
the work now done for the most part by great landowners. 
The municipalities of Paris, New York, San Francisco, or 
Melbourne are not model trustees of public interests; some 
think that even the Corporation of London and the Metro- 
politan Board of Works are far from all that is wanted. Is 
it quite certain that either of them would abolish misery 
and unhealthy dwellings the moment we had handed over 
to them the control of the Bedford, Salisbury, Portland, 
Portman, Grosvenor, and Cadogan estates? We may take 
it at least as certain that in the management of these neither 
fraud nor oppression is directly charged against the noble 
owners, other than such fraud and oppression as Mr. George 
finds in the act of owning land at all. To a citizen of Paris, 
New York, or San Francisco, accustomed to associate mu- 
nicipal government with bribery, rings, corners, and public 
plunder, such a state of things would appear an impossible 
Utopia. Every one who knows London can see how un- 



400 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

founded and even ludicrous are invectives against the peers 
who own considerable districts in our city. Large as these 
estates are, they do not account for a quarter of the area or 
the population. So far from these being the districts where 
suffering is greatest, they are altogether those in which 
it is least. The central, eastern, northern, and southern 
districts of London, where the dukes do not own a house, 
are those where the misery and overcrowding are the worst. 

Misery and overcrowding as great, if not greater, are 
found in Paris, Berlin, Naples, Lyons, Rouen, New York, 
and Melbourne, where there are no Norman barons, no 
dukes owning whole quarters. Everybody knows that Mr. 
George's famous gates near Euston Square were set up for 
the convenience, not of the duke, but of the inhabitants of 
the quarter. They are doubtless a public nuisance, but if 
the soil belonged to the parish we might have a dozen more 
set up. This is a specimen of the rhetoric to which Mr. 
George treats us. Happily our English reformers do not 
adopt this outlandish style of reform. I am certainly no 
friend of landlordism as an institution, or of aristocratic 
social traditions; I am for radical land reform both in town 
and country; but justice forces me to say, that amongst 
our great landowners, both in town and country, are to be 
found those men who, of all the rich and powerful in England, 
I will say of all the rich and powerful in Europe, administer 
their estates with the greatest sense of social duty and respon- 
sibility to public opinion. And when we have got rid of 
them, we shall have got rid of much that it will take us a 
long time to replace. 

On the whole, whilst we must thank the Land Nationali- 
sation movement for directing attention to many important 
truths, and whilst we may heartily go along with the spirit 
which inspires it, we cannot accept the chimerical hopes 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 401 

and the blind leap in the dark which it offers us as a remedy 
for all industrial evils. We should sacrifice for a mere 
dream all the solid results won by radical reform and prac- 
tical experiments ; for it would plunge us into a social revo- 
lution which might last for generations. The talk about 
"planting the English people on the soil" is surely mere 
words. However successful the plan, it could only plant 
about one in ten of our families on the soil. The twenty-six 
millions of Englishmen cannot all be planted on the soil; 
they are not Swiss or Norwegian woodcutters, nor are they 
all desirous of retiring to the country on a competence. And 
when they were planted on the soil, how would they live 
and earn a living if they have neither capital nor skill to 
work it? We might as well talk of planting the English 
people in the shops, or warehouses, or offices of England. 
What would they do when they got into the offices and shops 
without capital or business habits? A tailor presented 
with a cottage and ten acres would starve as quickly as a 
farmer would starve if presented with a lawyer's business 
as a going concern. There are now thousands of farms 
u on hand" because, rent or no rent, there is no one with 
capital and skill who cares to take them. 

Of the state management of capital, i.e. of simple Com- 
munism, I say little now T . We have not before us a definite 
statement of the views propounded by any systematic school 
of Communism. There are several organised bodies putting 
forward proposals of a more or less Communistic character ; 
and within our generation we have seen several Socialist 
movements of a more or less systematic kind. In what I 
say now I speak of no body in particular. I shall deal with 
the Socialist and Communist language which is to be heard 
nowadays in several quarters, both within and without the 
publicly-constituted bodies. There is not a little floating 

2D 



4-02 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

Socialism current around us. I neither fear nor despise 
Communism. I am anything but opposed to its motive 
spirit or its aspirations. I honour its generous instincts, 
and I sympathise with much in its social aims ; for undoubt- 
edly some of the noblest characters of our day are in sym- 
pathy with them, and it counts in its ranks men of heroic 
devotion to a social ideal. Nor need we undervalue its 
forces and the future destiny before it. 

On the continent of Europe it is already one of the mighty 
factors of social evolution. We shall have it here, I doubt 
not; though hardly in any form that is yet presented to us 
But in what form, in what system, with what doctrines, 
is Communism presented to Englishmen to-day? The 
Communism which alone has ever had a serious following 
— the Communism of Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Lassaell, 
and Karl Marx — had a social system of some kind, a body 
of logical doctrines, and an ideal of human society, however 
vague and extravagant. But the Socialism in many quar- 
ters now preached amongst us has none of these — neither 
economical theory, nor social scheme, nor system of life of 
of any kind. It offers nothing but invectives against the 
rich, fancy figures for its statistics, and appeals to the poor 
to begin a social insurrection. It has no economic, social, 
or political doctrines. It propounds no intelligible religious 
principle — no scheme of morality, of government, of insti- 
tutions, of education, of domestic, industrial, or civic life. 

Now no real insurrection was ever made by pure anar- 
chists. The people must have something to believe in, to 
hope for, and work for, before they will seriously rise. In- 
citements to plunder and to destroy do not touch the people, 
who need some great moral cause and some ideal in view 
to stir them profoundly. But Communism, as presented 
in England, offers no moral cause, no ideal. It has never 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 403 

faced, and has nothing to say about any one of the great 
social problems, about religion, morality, education, gov- 
ernment, public or domestic duty. It is not Communism: 
it is mere Nihilism. Communism implies the systematic 
organisation of life on the principle of community and not 
of individualism. This Nihilism, which pretends to be 
Communism, simply proposes the confiscation of property. 
How the capital so confiscated is to be worked — under 
what moral code, by what institutions, and for what social 
aim — on this it has nothing to say. 

How can it have? The small knots of propagandists 
whom we find here and there — some of them in organised 
societies, some in the press, the pulpit, or on platforms — 
seem to have no agreement about these things. Some are 
ministers of the Gospel; some profess materialism pure and 
simple; others belong to every intermediate phase of opin- 
ion. Their views about morality, education, government, 
and society are equally various. Now, although an economist 
is not bound, as such, to have any moral, religious, or edu- 
cational programme, a Communist is bound; for if people 
are to work in common they must be trained in common. 
Every serious Socialist or Communist school has provided 
for this. The interesting part about true Communism is 
that it so fully realises the impossibility of production on a 
Communistic basis without a complete set of institutions to 
mould life generally on a corresponding basis. 

All true Communists have seen that it is impossible to 
found a Communistic mode of industry without destroying 
private life. Hence they begin by attempting to found a 
set of social, family, and religious institutions to eradicate 
all traces of individualism. If they do not do this they know 
that Communism in labour is impossible. But the various 
groups who in England to-day advocate some vague Com- 



404 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

munistic proposals do none of these things. They may 
denounce our social sores, they may call every man who 
does not agree with them mere bourgeois (to these young 
gentlemen even trades-unionists and co-operators are all 
bourgeois — the real English workman does not even know 
the word bourgeois) ; but, in the absence of any social scheme, 
they will not penetrate the body of English workmen. 

Communism in a systematic form is, perhaps, not advo- 
cated amongst us. But Communistic proposals and Social- 
ist schemes have little meaning unless they can be placed 
on a logical footing. The only Communism which is worth 
serious notice is that complete Communism which seeks to 
transform all private property into Collectivism, or common 
property. It would be strange if English workmen, who 
have laboured so long and sacrificed so much in order to 
share with their fellows some of that security and indepen- 
dence which the legitimate use of property gives, and who 
have organised patiently such powerful agencies for checking 
the abuses of property, were suddenly to declare for universal 
confiscation in the blind chance that something might come 
of it. Trades unions, co-operative, building, land societies, 
and the rest would all disappear, for they all imply the in- 
stitution of property. 

The numerous associations of which we have here the 
delegates would have no raison d'etre. There would be no 
hope of a plot of ground for the countryman, of secure tenure 
of a farm, of a homestead of his own for any of us. There 
would be no " Union" on one side and employer on the other; 
no personal relation between any capitalist and any labourer 
or any farmer. There would be but one employer, one 
capitalist, one proprietor, one general manager of everything 
and everybody. That one would be the state. But what is 
the state in any intelligible sense as sole landlord, sole 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 405 

capitalist, sole manager ? The state, we know, collects taxes 
and manages the army and the navy, and some persons are 
not satisfied with the way that these trifles are managed. 
But what is the meaning of the state, the possessions of which 
should be the aggregate capital of the kingdom, and the 
spending departments of which would have to pay in earnings 
alone a thousand millions a year to twelve millions of persons ? 
And on what principles, by what institutions, and what 
machinery, is this fabulous task to be accomplished ? As no 
one has as yet given us any intelligible answer to this prob- 
lem, it will be wiser to adjourn so vast a question. 

From all that I have said it will appear that, whilst I hold 
as strongly as any man that our industrial system is socially 
unjust and unsound, I look upon none of the industrial 
schemes I have considered as going to the roots of the ques- 
tion. Our industrial system is vicious, because our moral, 
religious, and social system is disorganised. It is impossible 
to regenerate industry until we also regenerate society. 
Trades unions, co-operation, and all the mutual benefit 
movements are useful in their way, but they only touch the 
surface. Land confiscation could only affect a minority, 
and would not very clearly benefit them. Land confiscation 
is only a fragmentary and partial kind of Communism ; and 
Communism itself, as we hear of it to-day, is only a more 
sweeping confiscation, and a fragmentary and partial kind 
of social disorganisation. Property is only one of many 
social institutions ; and industry is only one of many human 
duties. To make property a little more common, more ac- 
cessible, to check some abuses of property here and there, 
may be exceedingly useful when wisely accomplished; but 
it cannot in itself alter human nature, life, and society. 
Even to abolish property, and to make a strict code for in- 
dustry, is only to get rid of one social institution, and to 



406 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

regulate one of many human duties. To expect a millen- 
nium from any kind of partial remedy is like giving pills to 
cure a fever. Industry can only be regenerated by regenerat- 
ing society. And society can only be regenerated by sound 
religion, true morality, right education, wise institutions, 
and good government. 

The root of the matter is that we can only change the 
general conditions of industry by changing the spirit in which 
industry is carried on; and we can only gain partial and 
temporary improvements by mending this or that industrial 
institution. Whilst men as a rule pursue their own desires 
and interests, the strongest and the most lucky will get the 
best of it, and the weak and the unfortunate will be cruelly 
used. And such is the ingenuity of human skill and the 
force of self-interest, that, alter as we please the mechanical 
modes in which industry is arranged, the strong and the for- 
tunate soon contrive to turn them to their own advantage. 
The best proof of this is to be found in Mr. George's own 
books, especially in his last. He shows us that the indus- 
trial evils he denounces grow to immense proportions where 
all the social conditions and industrial arrangements are 
varied, and society begins with a mere tabula rasa. Almost 
the only point in which the Pacific territories of America 
originally resembled England was this, that the passion of 
self-interest was imperfectly controlled by a sense of social 
duty, and in the case of the states was even abnormally 
stimulated. Here then, in human nature, without suffi- 
cient moral control, is the source of all this evil; and it is 
melancholy to see a man of genius labouring by a set of 
sophisms, each more preposterous than the last, to show that 
its source is in property in land. 

If the cause of industrial misery be traced to the passion 
of self-interest, and to a low sense of social duty, there might 



SOCIAL REMEDIES 407 

seem to be no more to be said. We should have to wait for 
a general improvement in civilisation. But there is more 
to be said. Industry has managed to develop a moral code 
of its own. In politics, philosophy, art, or manners, in do- 
mestic or social life, self-interest is not canonised as the prin- 
cipal social duty of man. In industry it is otherwise. For 
all industrial matters, in modern Europe and America, a 
moral code has been evolved, which makes the unlimited 
indulgence of self-interest, pushed to the very verge of liabil- 
ity to law, the supreme social duty of the industrious citizen. 
To buy cheap, to sell dear, to exhaust the arts of competi- 
tion, to undersell rivals, to extend business, to develop trade, 
to lend on the best security, to borrow at the lowest rate, to 
introduce every novelty, to double and to halve business at 
every turn of the market — in a word to create the biggest 
business in the least time, and to accumulate the greatest 
wealth with the smallest capital — this is seriously taught 
as the first duty of trading man. 

Economists, politicians, moralists, and even preachers 
urge on the enterprising capitalist that the industrialist does 
best his duty by society who does best his duty by himself. 
Banker, merchant, manufacturer, proprietor, tradesman, 
and workman alike submit to this strange moral law. Al- 
most the only class of capitalists in this island who do not as 
a rule accept it are, in truth, those great landlords who are 
the principal object of modern attack. It is assumed as 
beyond proof that the rapid increase of business, the great 
accumulation of wealth, is a good per se — good for the 
capitalist, good for society. No account is taken of the busi- 
ness ruined, of the workmen thrown out of employment, of 
the overproduction, of the useless, mischievous, rotten trade 
created, and of all the manifold evils scattered broadcast 
amongst the producers and every one within range of the work. 



408 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

It is enough to have made business, to have accumulated 
wealth, without coming within the grasp of the law. 

Here, then, is the all-sufficient source of industrial mala- 
dies. We have come, in matters industrial, to treat duty to 
others, and duty to society, as only to be found in duty to 
self. If all employers were as thoughtful of the general wel- 
fare of those they employ as they are now eager to get the most 
out of them ; if all producers were as anxious for good, sound, 
and useful production as they are for paying production; if 
those who lend money considered not only the security and 
the interest, but the purpose for which the money was sought ; 
if those who develop new works thought more of the workers 
than of possible profits, industry would not be what we see 
it. In other words, the solution of the industrial problem is 
a moral, social, and religious question. Industry must be 
moralised — infused with a spirit of social duty from top 
to bottom, from peer to peasant, from millionaire to pauper. 
But to moralise society is the business of moralists, preach- 
ers, social teachers ; the economist has but little more to add, 
and his field is not here. But here I must pause. This 
Conference is no place for moralising or preaching; neither 
religion nor social science have their pulpits here. And, 
for myself, anything I could say I must reserve for another 
place. 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 

(1889) 

The twenty-five years that had passed since the writer's essay 
on Trades-Unionism in 1865 (No. II. of this Part II.) 
had made a great change in the Labour world. The 
growth of Marxian Socialism in Europe reacted in 
England, and the energy of the Social Democratic Federa- 
tion made its mark on English politics. The great 
Dock Strike of 1889 made the public aware of the pro- 
found change that was slowly taking place. Another 
twenty years has very nearly passed, and the movement 
has gone forward on lines much as the writer foresaw in 
this Essay which appeared in the Nineteenth Century 
(vol. xxvi.). 

The most startling result of the new Industrial move- 
ment was seen in the enormous Liberal majority at the 
General Election of 1906, which placed in the Cabinet 
one of the prominent leaders of the Social Democrats, who 
had been sent to prison for his share in the Bloody Sunday 
riot, who led the people down Piccadilly and Hyde Park, 
and engineered the Dockers' Strike. 

There are signs to-day of the inevitable reaction. The 
bourgeoisie is getting uneasy at the sight of real Social- 
ism in Parliament and at Elections; and the utter inco- 
herence of Karl Marx's dogmas and the anarchic lan- 
409 



41 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

guage of many of his noisy followers seems destined again 
to separate middle-class Liberalism from any present 
type of Labour Socialism (iqo8). 

Within the last few years trades-unionism has been trans- 
formed under the influence of two main forces : — one being 
that profound social lever which is vaguely known as So- 
cialism; the other being the transfer to its side of Public 
Opinion. 

Thirty years ago, in the fifties, the old orthodox Economy 
was dominant; it received the superstitious veneration of 
the whole capitalist class; and it more or less overawed the 
leaders of the labouring class. To-day the old orthodox 
Economy — the Gospel, or the Sophism, of Supply and 
Demand, absolute Freedom for Individual Exertion, and 
so forth — all this is ancient history. " We are all Socialists 
now," cries an eminent statesman in jest or in earnest. And 
the jest has earnest in it, if we take Socialism to mean, not 
the substitution of some communistic Utopia for the old in- 
stitutions of Capital and Labour, but rather the infusion of 
all economic and political institutions with social considera- 
tions towards social ends. Thirty years ago Socialism was a 
mere outlandish day-dream. It is now, in the new vague 
sense, as a modifying tendency, a very real force. And it 
has killed the old Targum about Supply and Demand — 
the plain English of which was — " May the devil take the 
weakest ! " 

In the same way, within thirty years, the enormous power 
of Public Opinion has passed over to the side of trades- 
unionism. In old days a great strike was invariably de- 
nounced by the combined force of the cultivated and capi- 
talist classes. The press, the pulpit, the platform, society, and 
the legislature rang with menace and invective about the 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 411 

innate wickedness of all strikes. If here and there a clergy- 
man, a professional man, a politician, or a writer ventured 
to raise a voice on behalf of the unions, he was assailed with 
a storm of ridicule and abuse, and was often boycotted in his 
daily life. The well-known and most successful head of a 
certain college was almost deprived of his office by the 
trustees for defending the unions in public. 1 

When my name was proposed as a member of the Trades 
Union Commission of 1867, the appointment was hotly op- 
posed as a dangerous precedent; and more than one emi- 
nent solicitor calmly told me that, if I consented to serve, I 
must expect to quit the legal profession. If we sought to 
justify a strike to the public, we had the greatest difficulty 
in getting a word into the press edgewise, and a quiet state- 
ment of the true facts was almost systematically suppressed. 
Trades-unionism was spoken of much as we now hear men 
speak of Russian Nihilism; and a strike was condemned in 
the same language in which men now condemn the resort to 
dynamite. To the last generation of the educated and em- 
ploying classes, a strike had, indeed, all the elements of a 
dynamite outrage. It could not raise wages one farthing; 
it could only increase the sufferings of its infatuated partisans ; 
it could only annoy and embitter the capitalist ; and those who 
abetted it were the workman's worst enemies. 

Things are indeed changed now. We have just seen one 
of the greatest strikes on record carried to a successful issue 
with, and mainly by, the support and encouragement of the 
public. 2 The press was uniformly fair ; and, very generally, 
aided the movement. No sooner were the docks empty 
than money poured into the strike fund, not only from thou- 
sands of British unions but from across the seas, and from 

1 How different to-day after the legislation of 1907 ! (1908). 

2 The Dock Strike of 1889, engineered by Mr. John Burns. 



412 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the wealthy and the governing classes in all directions. " We 
were pelted with cheques," says the treasurer, and in a few 
weeks upwards of £40,000 was given. No Mansion-House 
Fund in a great national disaster, says John Burns, could 
have been " responded to with more extravagant generosity." 
In one memorable case, at least, a great employer — Mr. 
Henry Lafone — himself gave strike pay to his own men, 
when, under a sense of social duty, they left his works empty. 
The Stock Exchange raised a handsome sum towards the 
fund in a few minutes. Merchants and merchants' clerks 
cheered the strikers as they passed the warehouses in the 
City. London saw, without uneasiness or ill-will, 50,000 
men on the verge of starvation pass in procession through 
the streets. Politicians, clergymen, writers, and capital- 
ists backed up their demands with word and with purse. 
Churches of all creeds, educational and charitable institu- 
tions, gave their help. Catholics and Salvationists, Tories 
and Radicals, for once combined. The police for once were 
cheered by the East-End agitators. John Burns carried 
his tens of thousands up and down, like a Pied Piper of 
Hamelin, amidst a sympathetic world of bystanders — as of 
men bewitched. The very dogs of journalism forgot to bark. 
The East-End shopkeepers gave credit for goods. The 
pawnbrokers refused interest, and lodging-house keepers re- 
fused their rent. Finally a Lord Mayor, a Cardinal, a 
Bishop of London, and some prominent politicians, succeeded 
in bringing about peace in this tremendous upheaval of industry. 
Cardinal Manning, whose part in this matter shows out 
the Catholic Church on its grandest side, a side whereon, as 
Ireland, Liverpool, Glasgow, and London can prove, it is 
perhaps as much alive as it ever was, declares that "since 
the Cotton Famine of the North there has been no nobler 
example of self-command than we have seen in the last 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 413 

month." "In the great and extraordinary movement just 
ended," writes John Burns, "the cause of labour has been 
the popular cause the whole world over." "The whole 
East End," he adds, "rose and stood up alongside of us." 
"The greatest struggle between Capital and Labour that 
this generation of Englishmen has seen," writes Mr. Cham- 
pion, "has ended in the victory of the weaker side." "It 
marks an epoch not merely in the history of labour, but of 
England — nay, even of humanity," says Lord Rosebery 
in his midnight address to the tram servants. And when 
he opens a meeting to consider the formation of a new Union, 
avowedly as Chairman of the London County Council, his 
bold and sagacious act, so full of the new spirit that animates 
the citizens of London, is heartily approved by all but the pro- 
fessional critics of the other party. Truly the days are 
changed for the better since a strike was treated as a social 
outrage, and to advocate trades unions was to be marked 
as a "wild man." 

We have just witnessed not merely the greatest and most 
rapidly successful strike of our time, but we have seen an 
epidemic of strikes. There were at one time, in August 
(1889), 100,000 men on strike along the riverside. Hun- 
dreds of different trades took part in it. Within a few months 
nearly 200 different trades, according to John Burns, have 
gained an advance of 10 per cent in wages with a reduction 
of hours. More than 100,000 new members have been 
enrolled in unions. The labour problem has become a 
prime political interest. Statesmen, editors, churches, and 
leagues put labour questions in the front rank. Gas-stokers, 
coal-whippers, sailors, tram-drivers, women, are forming 
unions. The children in schools all over the country play 
truant in strike. Great and stubborn as were the contests 
maintained by the old unionism of the last generation, the 



414 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

new unionism of to-day immensely surpasses it in extent 
and in energy. What is the difference? 

The old ideas about unions and strikes have been entirely 
reversed. It used to be an axiom that the unskilled labour- 
ers, singly, stood almost no chance at all. Yet unskilled 
labourers have just won in the greatest strike on record. It 
was a truism that no great and prolonged strike could pos- 
sibly succeed without a solid union behind it. Yet here a 
vast strike has succeeded without a union; and the union 
has followed, and not preceded the strike. It used to be held, 
that where the supply of labour is practically unlimited, the 
idea of a strike is rank suicide. Yet here, with the whole 
population of these islands whereon to draw for unskilled 
labour, mighty and wealthy companies have failed to fill their 
empty docks. 

The new element is this. The trades have stood by one 
another as they never did before. The skilled workmen 
have stood by the unskilled workmen in a wholly new spirit, 
and public opinion supported the men as it never has done 
yet. In all the thirty years that I have closely studied the 
labour movement, I have never before known the best-paid 
and most highly skilled trades strike out of mere sympathy, 
simply to help the unskilled, where they had no dispute of 
their own. The skilled trades have often offered generous 
aid in money to other trades. But they never have struck 
work themselves, without asking or expecting any direct ad- 
vantage for the sacrifice. In the strike of the Dock labour- 
ers the whole brunt of the struggle lay in the turn-out of the 
stevedores, lightermen, sailors, engineers, and other skilled 
men. It was a general mutiny, led and commanded by the 
sergeants and corporals in mass. This was the cause of the 
excellent discipline and rapid organisation of the strikers, 
and it was also the ground of their success. Without the 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 415 

stevedores and other skilled officers, unskilled labour, even 
if it could be found, would have been useless in the 
Docks. 

There has been, then, through the whole East End — 
indeed, through the whole of London and of the kingdom — 
a sympathetic combination of workmen more rapid and more 
electric than anything seen before. We have witnessed 
what in the continental jargon used to be called the " soli- 
darity of labour," or the "fraternity of workmen" — a per-" 
fectly real and very powerful force, when it can be organised 
and brought into practical result. It simply means the com- 
mon interest of all the toiling millions to help each other 
towards their social improvement. Now, the old Unionism 
has often been charged (and not without reason) with its 
defects on this side. The older Unions have long been 
afflicted with the tendency so often remarked in religious 
sects which, after manfully resisting persecution in bygone 
times, have grown exclusive, hide-bound, retrograde, and the 
slaves of their own investments. Some years ago (in 1885) 
I ventured to point out in the Industrial Remuneration 
Conference {Report, p. 437) that in two generations Unionism 
has shown itself powerless to reach the residuum, or to com- 
bine the great average mass; that it tended to sectional and 
class interests; to divide trade from trade, members from 
non-members; that it accentuates the gulf between the 
skilled and well-paid artisan and the vast destitute residuum. 

The new Unionism is a very different thing. It has welded 
into the same ranks skilled and unskilled: it organises the 
average mass and takes charge of the residuum; it has 
extinguished sectional interests; and it is not absorbed in 
contemplation of its own cash balances. Years and years 
ago we laboured to convince employers that an established 
Union was a strongly conservative power, that it checked 



416 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

strikes, and often tended to prevent a rise of wages. The 
minority report of the Trades Union Commission, 1869 
(p. xxxvi.), pointed out that the strongest and richest Unions 
coincide with the greatest fixity in wages and hours, and the 
fewest trade disputes. In 1883 I pointed out to the Notting- 
ham Congress that the great societies for years past had not 
spent more than 1 or 2 per cent of their income in strikes. 
The permanent officials of a great Union, with an income of 
£50,000, and cash balances of twice or three times that 
amount, easily acquire the cautious, thrifty, contented, 
rest-and-be-thankful temper of a bank director or a City 
magnate. A famous old banker in Fleet Street was once 
told by a pushing bill-discounter of the new American type, 
that, by a very simple operation, he could easily add to his 
profits another £20,000 a year. "But I don't want another 
£20,000 a year," said the worthy old man. And I knew 
many a Unionist secretary of the old school who firmly be- 
lieved that the subscribers to his society did not want the 
" tanner," and would do no good with it, if they got it. 

Between Unionism of that type and the Socialists there 
has raged for some years past an internecine war. Furious 
accusations have been bandied about on both sides. Social- 
ists charged the Unions with bolstering up and stereotyping 
the miseries of the present industrial system, by thinking 
more of "superannuation," "benefits," and "cash balances," 
than of any general improvement in the conditions of labour. 
Unionists charged Socialism with incoherent raving about 
impossible Utopias, whilst doing nothing practical to protect 
any single trade. As usual, there was a good deal of force 
in what was said on both sides. Vague rant about Capital 
as organised plunder buttered no man's parsnips, and did not 
take ten seconds off the working day. On the other hand, 
it was a poor consolation to the sweated waistcoat-hand to be 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 



417 



told that the Amalgamated Engineers had a quarter of a 
million in the bank. 

But in the course of the present year Socialism and Trades- 
Unionism have been fused; and the new Unionism is the 
result. At last a modus vivendi has been found, with an 
alliance offensive and defensive for the time being. Each 
has contributed a special element of its own, and has allowed 
a good deal of its former character to drop. Socialism has 
contributed its dominant idea of betterment all along the 
industrial line, whilst borrowing from Unionism its regular 
organisation and practical tactics for securing a definite 
trade end. Unionism has contributed its discipline and 
business experience, whilst dropping its instinct towards 
mutual insurance "benefits" as the essential aim. And so 
Socialism for the nonce has dropped attack on the institu- 
tion of Capital. The new Unions are avowedly trade socie- 
ties to gain trade objects. The new Socialism is bent upon 
objects quite as practical as those of any Trades Union, and 
really the same. The joint movement may either be de- 
scribed as Socialism putting on the business accoutrements 
of a Trades Union — or as Unionism suddenly inspired with 
the passion and aspirations of the Socialists. The typical 
secretary of the old Unionism would have made a respectable 
branch manager of a Joint-Stock Bank. The typical leader 
of the new Unionism is a powerful club orator who finds him- 
self at the head of a great political movement. 

It is simple justice to acknowledge that this fusion is the 
work of one man. It is his work both in original conception 
and in practical application. He fully grasps it in prin- 
ciple, and thoroughly works it out in act. Where many men, 
both Socialists and Unionists, have honestly given good work, 
John Burns is the one man who is equally prominent both 
as a socialist and as a unionist. Certainly no other Socialist 



41 8 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

ever raised the wages of two hundred trades within a few 
months. And no other Unionist ever brought 100,000 men 
into union in the same time. I have often myself been 
strongly opposed to Mr. Burns, and have been opposed by 
him ; and I daresay the same thing will happen again. But 
I cannot, in justice, deny that he has been the head of the 
most extraordinary labour movement of our time. The 
recent strike, from a simply strategical point of view, was 
conducted with consummate skill, surprising energy and 
swiftness. But the ferment and passion which gathered 
round it, and which is still rolling on from its impulse, is a 
fact far deeper and more strange. A great strike is at best 
a grim, cruel, hardening tussle, even when most orderly and 
most justifiable ; and its anti-social spirit but too often rouses 
aversion in the disinterested public. 

The strike of the Docks was accompanied with a moral 
lift which kindled sympathy throughout the English world. 
John Burns contrived to fire it with a sense of social duty 
as its key-note. He stood up again and again preaching 
about men's duty at home and abroad; and the singular 
hold which he has won over the masses is due to the sense 
that he is regarded more as a moral reformer than as a strike- 
leader. The movement, as he said himself, became more 
like the spread of a religion than the demand of a rise in 
wages. Mothers of new-born infants had them carried to 
him through the crowd that he might put his hand upon them 
to bring luck. Just so I have seen women in Italy bring 
their children to Garibaldi to be blessed. My friend Mr. 
Broadhurst occasionally, I believe, expounds the Word, but 
I do not think that such an incident has ever befallen him. 
As orator, leader, teacher, and general in the field, John 
Burns has obtained amongst the workers of London an influ- 
ence much like that which Gambetta had over the French 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 419 

peasants, and by the exercise of some of the same gifts. 
Whatever be his gifts, the public and the legislature will, no 
doubt, soon be able to test them. 1 

Right or wrong, full of promise or full of danger, as it may 
be, the new Unionism is a very great force. It has already 
produced the greatest upheaval recorded in the history of 
modern industry, one which a statesman of Cabinet rank has 
described as — "an epoch in the history of labour and of 
humanity." But as yet we are only in the beginning. There 
are not yet a million unionists in the kingdom, whilst there are 
ten or twelve million workers of both sexes who might be. 
The new trades union is a machine far simpler, easier, more 
rapidly organised than the old ; and it can be formed ad hoc 
for any given occasion. There is thus an almost unlimited 
field for its activity, now that Socialists have taken to aim at 
practical results by borrowing the discipline and machinery 
of a true Trades-Union. 

Recent events may serve to display the incredible folly of 
the party who hoped to crush out Unionism at the time of the 
Royal Commission in 1869. They proposed compulsory 
legislation to divide every union fund into a separate trade 
fund and a separate benefit fund {Report, p. cxiii.). As the 
minority pointed out (p. lxi.) this would merely force the 
Unions to devote a large proportion of their resources to 
strikes, and take away from the Union officers the strong 
temptation to avoid disputes in order to accumulate a large 
balance. What the enemies of the Unions, with suicidal folly, 
tried to compel the societies to become, i.e. mere trade soci- 
eties or fighting unions per se, that the Socialists have now 
induced the societies to do voluntarily, or rather they have 
founded new Unions to effect that object. In the same way 

x As Cabinet Minister to-day, successful head of a great department of 
state (1908). 



420 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

the enemies of the Unions proposed to the legislature to 
make "picketing" criminal. The recent strike has shown 
us the greatest development of picketing ever known. There 
were 5000 "pickets" maintained night and day, over lines 
thirty or forty miles in extent, by land and water; and the 
discipline and vigilance of the cordon were as exact as with 
the Prussians at the siege of Paris. Without these "pickets" 
the strike would have collapsed in a week. Yet, in spite of 
the great extent of the lines and the desperation of starving 
men, no outrage of any serious consequence was proved, and 
the police were not called in to interfere. If "picketing" 
had been made illegal in 1869, the recent strike would have 
been suppressed by the resort to cavalry, as they do so con- 
stantly abroad. 

A brief review of the recent strike is not the place for a 
critical estimate of the new Unionism which carried the strike 
through and which has developed out of it. We wait to see 
how the new Unionism intends to work. Its opportuneness 
and its strength, its dangers and temptations, are patent 
enough. A Union having no large weekly dues, no costly 
deferred benefits, and no complex voting machinery, is ob- 
viously a more handy and more rapid instrument to wield 
than one of the rich, endowed, conservative, mutual insur- 
ance Unions. On the other hand, experience has shown that 
a mere strike society has no backbone and has no reserve 
fund to meet a lock-out. For years the unskilled trades have 
been forming temporary unions which soon die out, become 
insolvent, or encourage foolish, abortive strikes. A union 
with a splendid balance, with benefits "up to the chin," and 
one or two shillings a week in subscriptions, is apt to get as 
timid of change as "the old lady in Threadneedle Street." 
A Union which is a mere fighting Club soon exhausts itself 
in defeats, and disgusts those who put their trust in its prom- 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 42 1 

ises and who gave their money to its blunders. The perma- 
nent success of the new Unionism still remains to be proved 
by results ; for it will depend on the judgment and self-con- 
trol the new leaders can show. They have shown an energy, 
a swiftness, and a burning social enthusiasm which have long 
been unknown in the rich established Unions; and they 
have thereby seized a grand advantage in a favourable state 
of the Labour Market. But they will suffer terrible reverses, 
if they ever come to think that energy and fervour will avail, 
when the economic conditions of the Labour Market are 
dead against them. 

What they have proved is this : and it is most important. 
Whereas it used to be an axiom that unskilled workers in an 
open trade could not form regular unions or sustain a pro- 
longed strike, it is now shown that they can. It used to be 
thought that the very poor, the casual labourer, those who 
have no local employment (as sailors), and women, could 
never form a substantial union or a serious strike, because 
they could not afford weekly subscriptions, had nothing to 
fall back upon, and had not the endurance, discipline, esprit 
de corps, and patience which an obstinate struggle demands. 
The weakness of Unionism was, that it was only available 
to the skilled men in good wages, and often injured rather 
than helped the great unskilled mass. John Burns has 
lifted that reproach from it, for he has had the sagacity to see 
that Unionism hitherto has been presented to the unskilled 
in far too costly and elaborate a form ; and that to win sym- 
pathy, Unionism must take a truly social, and not a sectional, 
aim. If this new departure can be maintained, it amounts 
to a revolution in industry. 

The dead-weight which for generations has pressed upon 
labour in London is the fact, that for some fifteen or twenty 
miles on both sides of the Thames there has been a floating 



422 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

population in irregular employment, of casual habits and 
migratory bent. It was like a great leak in the bottom of 
the ship. East London was always growing bigger, and 
the greater the demand for labour, the larger grew the swarm 
of casual labourers. The great centre of disturbance was 
the Docks. From the peculiar conditions of the case, and 
under the fierce competition of rival companies, the vast 
shipping business of the Port of London stimulated the 
accumulation along the riverside of a mass of labour under- 
paid, irregularly employed, immensely over-stocked, and 
under the incessant competition of numbers, at the mercy 
of the pay-master. Often and often have I heard in Union- 
ist meetings indignant appeals against workmen "being 
treated like dock-labourers." It was the familiar instance 
of the lowest stage of industrial oppression. 

A new system is now to begin. May his "tanner" benefit 
the dock-labourer! But of far more importance to him 
than his "tanner" is the mitigation of his successive hours, 
of the irregular turns in his labour, of all mere casual hour- 
work. And above all important to him is the knowledge 
that he can now defend himself by combination, that he is 
just as capable of discipline, of organised resistance, and 
of brotherly confidence in man to man, as is the Associated 
Miner or the Amalgamated Engineer. The grand result of 
the Dock Strike is this : — the traditional gulf between 
"skilled" and "unskilled" labour has ceased. The new 
Unionism has fused them into one. 

But the new Unionism would not have done much if 
Public Opinion had not gone over to its side. Thirty or 
forty years ago the whole weight of English literature and 
current opinion backed up Capital always, and opposed 
Labour everywhere. The Reform agitation, the Chartist 
movement, the year 1848, the books of Carlyle, Kingsley, 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 423 

Maurice, Ruskin, and the later writings of Mill, shook the 
orthodox gospel. But in the main the press, Parliament, 
and society teemed with calumny of Unionism and all its 
works. The great strikes of 185 1-2-3 anc ^ 1858-9 pro- 
duced a deep impression. But the first systematic attempt 
to judge Unionism fairly was made by the remarkable Com- 
mittee of the Social Science Association, which published 
its Report in i860. On that Committee of thirty-two may 
be seen the names of twelve Members of Parliament, four 
subsequent Ministers (including H. Fawcett, W. E. Forster, 
and George S. Lefevre), five civil servants of the Crown, 
and twelve men of letters and of science. That book was 
the starting-point of honest study of the practical labour 
problems. Then came the Royal Commission of Trades 
Unions in 1867-8-9, when the extravagant proposals of the 
economic pedants were baffled by the steady good sense and 
the popular sympathies of two peers — Lord Wemyss and 
Lord Lichfield. 

Of course the transfer of political power effected in the 
various Reform Acts of the last twenty years has exerted a 
profound silent revolution. And the fact that the workmen 
are now the depositaries of power has forced the rich to 
listen to their demands with a hearing entirely new. Along 
with a recasting of our whole political system into a demo- 
cratic form, there has gone during the last twenty years an 
immense movement in social philosophy and social politics. 
The Commune in France, the land struggle in Ireland, the 
growth of Socialism on the Continent, the teaching of Karl 
Marx, Henry George, Mill, Comte, and those whom each 
of these have influenced, have continually broken up the 
old economic purism, the gospel of laissez-faire and unlim- 
ited licence to individual selfishness. Along with these 
have worked an immense body of organised movements, 



424 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

with many different schemes and with widely-divergent 
creeds, such as the Salvation Army, Toynbee Hall, Newton 
Hall, the Social Democratic Federation, the Land Nation- 
alisation Societies, and all the other agrarian movements 
in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, with Guilds, 
Leagues, and Societies innumerable ; such enquiries as those 
of the Industrial Conference of 1885, Mr. Charles Booth's 
Analysis of Labour in East London, 1889, the Trades Union 
Annual Congress, and all the various types of Christian 
Socialism that are weekly preached in Church and Chapel. 

Socialism in any systematic or definite form, as a scheme 
for superseding the institution of Capital, has not as yet in 
my opinion made any serious way. At least I know of no 
coherent scheme for eliminating individual ownership of 
property which can be said to have even a moderate following 
of rational and convinced adherents. The enthusiasts who, 
here and there, put forth such schemes are not really under- 
stood by those whom they get to listen to them. But So- 
cialism, as meaning the general desire to have all the arrange- 
ments of society, economic, legislative, and moral, controlled 
by social considerations and reformed to meet paramount 
social obligations — this kind of Socialism is manifestly in 
the ascendant. Such Socialism, I mean, as is found in Henry 
George's powerful book called Social Problems, where we 
have his view of the problem apart from his sophistical 
"remedy." The old satanic gospel of laissez-faire is dead: 
and, in the absence of any other gospel of authority, a vague 
proclivity towards Socialism comes to the front. 1 

Whatever name we give it, a settled conviction has grown 
up in the conscience of serious men of all schools, that society 
in its present form presses with terrible severity on the whole 

1 Twenty years have made a great difference in this as in other things. 
But I am not disposed to make a very different estimate now (1908). 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 



42 5 



body of those who toil in the lowest ranks of labour. And 
from Bismarck and the Pope downwards all who bear rule, 
and all who teach, are coming to feel that society is in a 
very rotten state whilst that continues. We are all waking 
up to see (what many of us have been preaching for years) 
that it will not do, and must be mended or ended. Hence 
when 100,000 men along the riverside rose up to protest 
against their casual employment and their miserable pay, 
the world very generally, both of rich and poor, thought 
that they were right, and gave them encouragement and 
help. People knew something definite about the East End 
and London Labour. The Mansion-House Committees, 
the House of Lords Committee on Sweating, the Royal 
Commission on the Housing of the Poor, the Industrial 
Conference of 1885, the experiences of Beatrice Potter, the 
studies of Charles Booth and his friends, and all that for 
years has been said and done in Toynbee Hall, Bedford 
Chapel, Newton Hall, the Working Men's College, the Hall 
of Science, the City Temple, and a thousand platforms, 
pulpits, and clubs — had made men think and given them 
matter for thought. Public opinion has passed over to the 
side of the labourer; and when he made his effort, public 
opinion helped him to success. 

There are lessons enough for every one in what has just 
happened. The Socialist of the Karl Marx School may 
reflect how sterile a thing Socialism has proved all these 
years that it has been raving out its fierce conundrums about 
the wickedness of private property, and how solid are the 
results to be won when it consents to enter on a practical 
business bargain. The violent assailants of Trades Union- 
ism may reflect that they have done nothing practical, until 
they resorted to Unionism themselves and adopted its famil- 
iar tactics and its well-tried machinery. The old Unionist 



426 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

may reflect that, in forty years past, the conventional Union- 
ism has proved utterly powerless to effect what in a few 
weeks two or three prominent Socialists have done. The 
men who grow hoarse in declaiming about the selfishness 
and brutality of the middle classes may think of the solid 
assistance they had from the middle classes in sympathy 
and in money. And the middle classes, who were wont 
to regard the East-End labourer as a feckless, or dangerous 
loafer, may ponder on the discipline, honesty, endurance, 
and real heroism which, in defence of what they knew to 
be a just cause, so many thousands of the poorest of the 
poor have shown. 

The Socialist with a system and the impatient reformer 
generally have often turned with mockery from all reliance 
on public opinion and from any such doctrine as "the morali- 
sation of industry." When they have been told that — 
"the true socialism is this : the use of Capital must be turned 
to social objects, just as Capital arises from social combina- 
tion" : — when it has been preached to them that "industry 
must be moralised by opinion, not recast by the State — mor- 
alised by education, by morality, by religion" — the Socialist 
with a system and the impatient reformer goes off with a 
laugh or a sneer. Well ! but this is what has just happened. 
Public Opinion has been changed, and it has worked great 
results. Capital, to a certain extent, has been moralised, 
and Industry also has been moralised. The very poor have 
been taught to feel self-respect and self-reliance, to bear 
much for a common cause, to practise self-denial for a social 
benefit. The rich have been taught to listen with more 
sympathy to the poor, and to know themselves as responsible 
for the sufferings of those they employ. What has happened 
is a great lesson to rich and poor, to employers and employed, 
in the imperishable and paramount force of Social Duty 



SOCIALIST UNIONISM 427 

in the long run. The immediate results are not very great. 
But it is a beginning: and much may come of it. In the 
meantime, the persistent appeal to the public conscience 
on moral and social grounds has done, what trades union- 
ism per se has failed to do in forty years, and what all the 
schemes for confiscating private Capital and nationalising 
private property have only succeeded in hindering and delay- 
ing being done. 



VI 
MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 

(1891) 

From the foundation of Positivist centres by Dr. Congreve in 
i86q, the writer and his colleagues had continually pre- 
sented the industrial theories of Auguste Comte on the 
platform and the press. As President of the Positivist 
Committee down from the year i8yg, he consistently 
maintained the same views in a series of lectures, and 
especially in the Annual Address which he invariably 
delivered on New Year's Day. The following Discourse 
was part of that given by him at Newton Hall on Janu- 
ary 1, i8qi. 

It must not be forgotten that the address here printed 
is merely an extract; simply part of a course of propa- 
ganda which extended over more than thirty years. It is 
obviously a sketch — or brief summary of principles. If 
it be asked in what way, by what agencies, and under 
what religious ideal, any Moral and Religious So- 
cialism could be ultimately based in practice, the answer 
is to be found in the entire synthesis of Positivist Ethic 
and religion — which has been the inspiration of the 
writer's whole active life, and the underlying idea of this 
book and his other works (iqo8). 

It is now, I think, for the sixth year in succession that I 
have tried to direct attention to the growth of Socialism in 

428 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 



429 



England, and I will treat it more in detail on this occasion. 
With the general aim and idea of Socialism, Positivists, of 
course, are in hearty sympathy. With almost every word 
of its criticism on the actual industrial condition of Europe, 
with its indignant rejection of the pedantic formulas of the 
old Plutonomy, we entirely concur. With its main principle 
that all material wealth is the common product of society 
and labour, and is never a merely individual creation, we 
are wholly in agreement. With its repudiation of absolute 
rights of Property, and its assertion of the paramount claims 
of Society to dispose of all that which could have no exist- 
ence but for Society itself, we cordially join. Positivism is, 
in a large and true sense of the word, itself an organised 
Socialism. Its whole scheme of life, of education, and of 
industry is essentially a mode of socialism — but socialism 
with a difference. And that difference is, that Positivism 
is a complete, universal, and religious socialism — not a 
socialism limited to material products. It is a socialism 
founded on social science and inspired by religion. 

There is no paradox in this. From the Positivist point 
of view, the current Socialism is essentially right in idea, 
so far as it goes; but it is limited and incomplete. It does 
not carry the idea half far enough. The Socialists around 
us fill the air with denunciations of the cruelty of Capital, 
of the disinherited state of the labourer, of the miserable 
pittance which his severest labour can bring. Most true ! 
and heartily do we join in these outcries. But it is not 
enough. There is appalling cruelty in men and women 
who have no capital. Many a parent, many a child, many 
a neighbour, makes life a burden to those whom they control 
or affect. Those who possess physical strength often cruelly 
abuse it ; those who are rich only in the love, care, and con- 
sideration which are lavished on them, cruelly waste these 



430 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

precious gifts. Those who have any form of power, those 
who have rare gifts of intellect, learning, or peculiar resources, 
often most selfishly hoard or squander their store. 

The poor are shamefully excluded from the laden tables 
of the Commonwealth; but they are excluded also from 
education, from knowledge, from art, from cultivation, 
from a thousand things which those who have them prefer 
to keep to themselves. Selfishness, and anti-social misap- 
propriation of the common store of humanity, are not 
things confined to material products ; nor will any rearrange- 
ment of material products extinguish them. The institu- 
tions and habits that cluster round our Family Life, the 
appliances of civilised life, the common knowledge of our 
generation, the arts, the sciences, the manners and courtesies 
of life — are equally the product of Society, as much as are 
factories or railways, and they are often most selfishly abused 
or personally misappropriated to the interest of particular 
individuals. The cry of the Socialist, that the material 
things produced by all should not be appropriated by the 
few, is most true. But it is only a part of the truth. 

All that Socialists urge of the injustice of the social arrange- 
ments whereby, when the owner of a coal-mine sets a thou- 
sand men to dig in the pit, at the end of twenty years he has 
amassed a great fortune whilst the thousand men have nothing 
but their worn-out bodies and limbs — all this is unanswer- 
able; it is unjust, and indeed intolerable. We are wholly 
with them when they cry that, come what may, it must, 
and shall be changed to a more humane arrangement of 
Society. But the Socialist puts it on far too narrow a ground 
when he makes the claim of the pitmen entirely rest on right. 
It is a confused, discredited, and illusory basis, is that of 
right. Legal right we know : which means simply what the 
dominant body in each state which controls its legislation, 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 43 1 

chooses from time to time to enact. And we know what 
under democratic suffrages legal rights are now in England, 
or in France, or in America, democratic republics as they 
too are. But right, apart from law, is a mere quicksand, 
torn to pieces by scores of clear reasoners, a mere rag of 
the silly Rousseauism of the last century. 

The lecturer at the street-corner appeals to right, by 
which he means what he would like to see done. But trained 
minds know too well that right is a mere phrase to juggle 
with, without a shadow of sound philosophic basis, indeed 
without a trace of consistent meaning. If Stradivarius 
makes a violin; and Beethoven composes a sonata; and 
Joachim plays it on the instrument — what are the rights 
of Stradivarius, Beethoven, and Joachim respectively in 
the money which people pay to hear the performance? 
Every one, from a musician to a doorkeeper, would differ 
as to the shares of the three. And who could answer so 
ridiculous a question — except by saying that the rights 
of the instrument-maker, the composer, and the player were 
what each might agree to allow to the others ? Just so ! 
rights are an absolutely insoluble dilemma, except on the 
basis of free contract. And free contract is just the system 
which the plutonomists now vaunt as the eternally fair sys- 
tem, the system under which in England, in Scotland, in 
Ireland to-day, all the cruelty and oppression is done. In 
other words, to appeal to right is either to appeal to law as 
it is, or else to appeal to the same legerdemain of phrases, 
under which the most savage oppression by Capital is worked 
on the present system. 

The relations of man to man in a highly developed society 
are infinitely complex, and elude everything but a sound, 
searching, and scientific philosophy of human nature and of 
the social organism. And do the Socialists of whom we hear 



432 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

most pretend that they have any such philosophy worthy of 
the name ? The Socialism which we preach here does rest 
on such a philosophy, based on universal history, on a study 
of the human character, and an exhaustive survey of all the 
faculties and the wants of the human body and the human 
soul. Here we rest the claim of the labourer to a full share 
— not merely in that which his hands have made — but in 
all things which his neighbours and fellow-citizens have — 
their knowledge, their thought, their skill, their refinement, 
their wisdom and strength, — on the indefeasible duty of all 
to co-operate in the great social combination from which 
all they have is ultimately derived and to which they owe 
every faculty of their nature. 

There was a memorable saying of the last generation: 
Property has its duties as well as its rights. But our view 
of Property is this : The rights of Property mean a concentra- 
tion of social duties. Our Socialism rests on Duty not on 
Right. Duty is always plain; Right is a verbal mystifica- 
tion. A man can always and everywhere do his duty. He 
seldom can get his supposed rights without trampling on 
the rights of others. Men wrangle incessantly as to rights. 
They easily agree as to duties. The performance of duty 
is always an ennobling, a moral, a religious act. The strug- 
gle for rights calls out all the passions of self and of combat. 
The curse of humanity is selfishness, the interests, the lusts, 
the pride of self. And we are now told to find the blessing 
of humanity in constant struggle for rights — which can 
mean nothing but a deeper absorption in self. 

Unhappily in the current language of Socialists we too often 
miss two important elements which enter into all products, 
material or intellectual, but which are usually completely 
left aside. These are first: the enormous part played in 
every product by the society itself in which it is produced, 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 433 

the past workers, thinkers, and managers, and the social 
organism at present, which alone enables us to produce at 
all. An ocean steamship could not be built on the Victoria 
Nyanza nor could factories be established on the banks of 
the x\ruwhimi. No one in these discussions as to " Rights 
of Labour" seems to allow a penny for government, civil 
population, industrial habits, inherited aptitudes, stored 
materials, mechanical inventions, and the thousand and one 
traditions of the past and appliances of civil organisation, 
without which no complex thing could be produced at all. 
And they entirely leave out of sight posterity. That is to 
say, Socialist reasoners are apt to leave out of account Society 
altogether. And Society, that is the Social Organism in the 
Past plus the Social Organism of the moment, is some- 
thing entirely distinct from the particular workmen of a given 
factory or pit, and indeed has interests and claims quite 
opposed to theirs. Society, which Socialists ought to be the 
very last to forget, is the indispensable antecedent, and very 
largely the creator, of every product. 

A second element in production which is left out of sight 
is the material, plant, and capital employed in the product, 
the organisation of the entire business, and the mental crea- 
tion of the common work. We often hear capital and plant 
spoken of as if they grew in the fields, or fell down from the 
sky, or as if they were mere bits of luxury, like a park or a 
yacht, which rich men were bound to lend to poor men who 
want them. But who made capital, or plant, or factories, 
or yards, and docks, ships, and engines, but other working- 
men who have to live out of their labour, and who cannot 
transfer the results of their labours without securing their 
own livelihood? Socialists talk as if the yarn spun in a 
cotton mill was entirely produced by the labour of the spin- 
ners; and they say the mill and the machinery ought to 

2F 



434 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

belong to the state. But the mill and the machinery are the 
result of the labour of many more men than the spinners, 
working many years. The capitalist (so called) is simply 
the man who has advanced them their means of living all 
this time. Suppose the vampire capitalist suppressed. How 
is the state going to support the builders and engineers and 
pitmen, who build the mill and forge the machinery, and 
dig the coal, except by taking half the wages from the spin- 
ners as taxes? This seems an odd device for increasing the 
wages of the workmen. 

Again. Who made the cotton-spinning business? Who 
created the complex trade relations without which the mill 
would stand idle for want of orders ? Who calculates quan- 
tities, profits, prices, rise and fall of markets, and the intricate 
and delicate organisation of a paying concern? Who but 
the mill-owner or his predecessor in title, and one or two skilled 
experts trained from childhood to this very difficult work. 
Socialist lecturers sometimes say, "Of course, the rights of 
management will be guaranteed." But this is a very off- 
hand way of shunting the question. The mills which cover 
the bare hillsides and glens of Lancashire and Yorkshire, 
the docks of Liverpool, or of London, the pits of Durham 
and Northumberland did not grow, and sink themselves. 
They were as completely created by the genius and resolu- 
tion of particular men as the locomotive was invented by 
Stephenson or the art of printing by Gutemberg. Manage- 
ment indeed ! That is a ridiculously easy way of putting it. 
You cannot hire a manager for these things. A great busi- 
ness needs its general as completely as an army. The battle 
of Waterloo would never have been won without Wellington. 
Nor would St. Petersburg have existed without Peter the 
Great, nor Berlin without Frederick. Imagine Prussians or 
Russians hiring a manager to create their nation or found 
their capitals. 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 435 

In all these discussions men too often forget altogether the 
indispensable part of the organising mind — without which 
most undertakings would never exist at all, or would be 
doomed to failure. The continual disasters, and at best 
the very trifling success of those undertakings which in the 
last thirty years have been started and carried on by the 
workmen themselves, form the best evidence of this. And 
the one or two cases in which a perceptible profit has been 
made are those in which the market already existed, and the 
whole conditions of the trade were simple and notorious. 
There is no case on record of a body of workmen creating a 
new market, or founding an original enterprise. 

Still more completely forgotten is the moralising power of 
capital when it is directed under real social impulses and in 
a spirit of genuine social obligation. The best and most 
useful qualities called out in human nature are incapable of 
acting without freedom in the disposal of material power in 
some form, and some kind of authorised appropriation of 
material things : — limited and modified it may be, but not 
entirely suppressed. The domestic life of the simplest family 
would be impossible, if they had not even a room they could 
call their home, not a bit of furniture, not a picture, or a 
book, not a chair, nor a bed, which they could reasonably 
expect to occupy the next day. No man could feel himself 
a free and independent citizen if he could not call his boots, 
or his shirt, or his hat his own ; no man could work at his 
best, if he could not look to keeping the same set of tools in 
his own bag. 

If room, bed, plates, cups, knives and forks, clothes, tools, 
books, and every material thing were served out to citizen 
No. 7695, every morning from the public stores, men would 
feel themselves in a prison or a barrack, and the noblest and 
most powerful qualities of citizenship would be destroyed. 



436 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

If no man could look to reap the corn which he had sown, 
or to plough next year the same field which he farmed last 
year, no practical farming could be done at all, and the 
farmer would feel himself to be a slave or a convict. What 
is it that forces all reasonable Socialists to-day to accept 
appropriation for all such domestic and personal concerns, 
though obviously on the strict theory of Socialist right a man 
has no more right to a bed, or a cot which he did not make, 
but bought in the market, than a capitalist has to a mill, or 
a ship, which he bought and did not make ? On the abstract 
theory of rights, that things only belong to those who make 
them, a man's coat belongs not to him, but to the farmer 
who grew the wool, and the weaver who made the stuff, and 
the tailor who cut it out and sewed it together. We know 
that no reasonable Socialist pushes abstract theory so far. 
That is to say, reasonable Socialists surrender the doctrine 
of rights, for the sake of social convenience and by mere 
force of human nature. 

It is a question of degree where the line of appropriation is 
to be drawn. Every one agrees that, if all kinds of appropria- 
tion of Capital were absolutely barred by law, society would 
soon revert to a state of primitive barbarism. We can all 
see that appropriation of home, of domestic appliances, of 
clothes, books, tools, of farms, workshops and the like, is 
indispensable to the best activity of human life. Most 
Socialists would add some stock of money or money's worth, 
for few would be ready to face so complete a barrack system, 
that a man would have to apply to the board for an order, 
if he wished to change his house, or take his family for a 
holiday. Here, we are prepared to carry the principle fur- 
ther, and say : — that limited and qualified appropriation of 
farms, of mills, of factories, of ships and the material instru- 
ments of production is not only indispensable to anything 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 437 

like adequate production, but is alone the means of calling 
out the exercise of the finest forces of human nature, of 
activities without which life would be mean and dull indeed. 

In the shameful misuse of Capital which is so common 
around us, and in the cynical selfishness with which the rights 
of Capital are usually asserted, we hear nowadays incessant 
outcries about the crimes of Capital, and next to nothing 
about the indispensable services of Capital to Society. The 
outcry is indeed abundantly justified. But t h e services wh ich 
Capital renders to Society are quite as real and quite as f ar- 
reachi ng ; though Capitalists themselves are usually too b lind 
or to oarrogant to assert them ^and th ough, in the ob sequious 
defe rence that we now show to the popular cry of t he hour, 
fe w social reformers will venture to murmu r a good word 
fqr jhe social utility of Capital in princ iple. Indeed, unless 
Capital can show itself in a more social attitude, or unless 
social philosophy can prove its necessity on better grounds 
than those of the obsolete laws of Plutonomy, it is far from 
impossible that the institution itself may be shaken to its 
foundations, and suffer a temporary dissolution. If it can- 
not reform itself in time, that is perhaps the only thing that 
could happen. The institution will of course reconstruct 
itself rapidly again, and it may be hoped on broader founda- 
tions and with a nobler spirit. But in the interval, frightful 
disasters would be the portion of our complex industrial 
system ; widespread misery to the point of starvation would 
befall our people ; and a staggering blow would be delivered 
to the intellectual, material, and moral progress of civilisation. 

Capitalists themselves are usually unconscious of the 
immense benefits which they really confer on society, whilst 
they imagine themselves to be exerting nothing but thrift, 
prudence, and honourable ambition. Without the energy 
and ability which only can secure industrial success, the 



43^ NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

undertakings they direct would be disastrous failures, and 
workmen would everywhere be thrown out of employment. 
Without the passion for accumulation which makes a capital- 
ist what he is, products would be consumed as fast as they 
were made, and no accumulation would exist. Without 
accumulation, society would come to a standstill, and at 
the first turn of bad times or a succession of bad seasons, the 
people would everywhere be deprived of the means of living. 
We hear much about the immense profits which capitalists 
make ; but no one ever speaks of the enormous drains on 
capital which in bad times they bear in silence. 

The working masses know nothing about these huge, pro- 
longed, and alarming losses, which the capitalist himself is 
too prudent to disclose to any one but his lawyer and his 
banker. He struggles on with courage and tenacity, as if he 
were making a profit ; and often as not, he saves the ship at 
last. In the meantime his workmen are being paid, some- 
times year after year, out of the accumulated savings, just 

^ as if the business were still running at a profit. If there 
were no capitalist, and the concern were managed by public 
meetings of those who work in it, the following results would 
arise (i) The profits in good years would be consumed as 
they were made, and no accumulation to speak of would be 

J formed; (2) the instability of management by meeting would 
lead to speedy ruin; (3) the publicity involved in public 
management would be destructive to business; (4) in bad 
years, the workers in meeting assembled would never submit 
to the reduction in salaries required to meet losses, and 
would never have the tenacity to face a long succession of 
losses and reduction : a panic would arise, and the business 
would be broken up. 

If the "business" were the property of the state, and if 
the management were that of a Government department, 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 439 

what is there to show that it would be managed more liber- 
ally than the Dockyards, Government factories, of the Post 
Office, in all of which we hear the loudest outcries of tyranny, 
which are often said to be types of Public Sweating ? Social- 
ism involves, in order to give it a fair chance, an entire recon- 
struction of our whole social system and all our principles of 
public life. Quite so. That is our point. Socialism offers 
no such fundamental social regeneration. Positivism does. 
And by the time the social reconstruction is effected, it will 
be found that anti-Capitalist Socialism is no longer needed. 
Capital acts as a reservoir does, which in seasons of drought 
keeps a city supplied with water till the streams begin again 
to flow. It is created by the peculiar aptitude for manage- 
ment shown by a few individuals having a genius for that kind 
of work. It is maintained by the passion for accumulation 
urging special natures to submit to great efforts and to resist 
immediate temptations. But this genius for business, this 
instinct of accumulation, and this dogged tenacity of purpose 
are comparatively rare. Ninety-nine in every hundred have 
not got these qualities, or have not got them in special degree 
and in due combination. The hundredth man is a born 
capitalist, or manager of capital; and, as surely as a born 
painter will paint and a born singer will sing, he will accumu- 
late and maintain the accumulations, if you offer him the 
chance and give him a free hand. But to suppose that you 
can hire him to do this work at so much a week, or for board, 
lodging, and clothing, without pocket-money or luxuries of 
any kind, is a foolish and ignorant assumption. Nor is it 
less foolish to suppose that he will do his work as well, if 
you do not give him a free hand at all, but have him up 
before the "board" or the shareholders, and give him his 
orders week by week, as if he were merely your managing 
clerk. 



440 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

It is commonly said that the example of Railways, Banks, 
and other Joint-Stock concerns proves that it is quite possible 
to carry on vast business affairs on the collective principle, 
with elected managers and hired agents. There cannot be a 
more transparent sophism. These joint-stock concerns are 
not carried on or managed by those whom they employ, and 
to whom they pay weekly wages. The directors are not 
workmen; they have no interests other than those of the 
shareholders; both directors and shareholders all belong to 
the capitalist class, not to the labouring class. The whole 
of the shareholders, without exception, belong to the few 
who have capital, and whose habits are all those of the 
capitalist order. They were all bred more or less to business. 
And they practically trust the interests of the concern to a very 
few selected directors, usually men of great wealth, who are 
also professional experts. Not a single person to whom the 
Company pays wages has a voice in the management, either 
directly or indirectly. And the whole concern is carried on 
by a few picked capitalists, in whom a larger group of capi- 
talists are satisfied to place implicit confidence. The con- 
sequence is that the Bank of England, a Railway, or a Steam 
Ship Company, is carried on exactly in the same way as the 
firm of Rothschild, Cunard, or W. Whiteley. What is the 
analogy between the management of a Joint-Stock Company 
by a selected Board of Capitalists, and the management of 
a Railway by its own drivers, stokers, guards, and porters; 
or of an Ocean Shipping line by its own seamen, firemen, 
shipwrights and labourers? There is no analogy at all. 

The Socialist theory implies that business concerns are 
to be carried on or controlled by those who do the manual 
work, not by men specially trained to great affairs. Does 
any rational man imagine that the stokers and navvies em- 
ployed on a Railway are likely to keep down their own wages 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 441 

in order to provide funds for a new stock five years hence; 
that a body of ten thousand men, three-fourths of whom 
cannot keep half-a-crown in their pockets, are going to think 
of the next generation; or that they are likely to trust the 
" Board" in the way in which the Chatham and Dover 
shareholders trust Mr. J. S. Forbes and have made him 
dictator for life? 

Working-men accustomed to the simple operations of 
their own particular craft are prone to imagine the conduct 
of a business to be an easy matter; and when they manage 
a co-operative store for the supply of bacon, flour, and jam, 
they are told by some silly friends that they have proved 
their fitness to direct masses of accumulated capital. It 
is a pitiable delusion. The success of a club to buy food 
for the members at wholesale prices can prove nothing of 
the kind. They are producing nothing for the public market, 
nor are they competing with individual capitalists at all. 
The direction of a large trading or manufacturing concern 
requires powers of will, of decision, of insight, of intuition, 
only given to some men out of many, and only brought to 
perfection by the training of a life. The qualities required 
in a successful man of business are somewhat like those 
required by a successful general in the field. And it would 
be as idle to expect that Armstrong's Gun Factory, the Great 
Western Railway, or Cunard's Packet Line could be success- 
fully run by public meetings of the founders, stokers, sailors, 
or labourers they employ, as it would be to expect that 
Wellington's campaigns could have been won by councils 
of war elected by universal suffrage throughout his army. 

The scheme of Socialism implies something quite different 
from management by a 'Board.' A " Board," such as 
we know, consists of capitalists, and they do not divide profits 
amongst themselves. Unless workmen employed at daily 



442 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

wages are to have control of the profits, Socialism can mean 
nothing. Its proposal is to put the distribution of the profits 
into the control of the manual workers alone. What then 
would happen? The workers, who have no formed habits 
of accumulation (for, if they had, they would not be work- 
men), would divide amongst themselves the utmost possible 
farthing of profit. The concern would be left without due 
reserves, and the growth of capital would be arrested. When 
Socialists talk of the " state," they mean nothing but the 
decisions, from day to day, of the masses of workmen in 
democratic assemblies. 

The gain per contra, we are told, would be that the sums 
now personally consumed by the capitalist would be saved. 
It is quite true that many capitalists — let us say most 
capitalists — in the absence of any real control, social, 
moral, or religious — do now selfishly and shamelessly con- 
sume disproportioned shares of the profits. Their reckless 
egoism may yet ruin the very institution of property itself; 
and it certainly forms the greatest danger by which property 
is threatened. But, however morally evil and publicly 
scandalous their selfish ostentation may be, it is not socially 
so injurious as it looks at first sight. Even wanton luxury 
in personal expenditure by a large employer of industry 
consumes but an insignificant part of the gross returns of 
his business; and it forms often but a trifling fraction of 
what he pays in weekly wages. A large employer consumes, 
we will say, £5000 per annum, when he pays in wages at 
least £100,000. If the whole of his expenditure were de- 
voted to increase wages, they would only be raised is. in 
the pound. The workman who receives 20s. would then 
receive 21s. And as things now stand, we know too well 
where the extra shilling would go. 

Against this must be set the prospect that, on the Socialist 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 443 

theory, not one man, but at least a thousand, would be 
tempted to consume the profits year by year "up to the 
hilt" ; and that, it must be allowed, for the best of all reasons 
— to provide bread for their children. As a body, they 
would be without the intense passion for accumulation 
which makes a man a capitalist, and without which no busi- 
ness could be carried on long. The world sees the wanton 
and selfish expenditure of which capitalists are too often 
proud. But it sees nothing of the silent indefatigable ac- 
cumulation which goes on alongside of the waste. Now 
the accumulation on the whole is far more extensive and 
of more importance than the waste. It is very often made 
under intensely selfish motives: but society gains equally, 
whatever be the motives. 

Under the present system of Capital, accumulation is 
secured, be it well or ill, and usually it is not well. It is 
perhaps true that the accumulation is far too rapid, too 
spasmodic, and often ill judged. It ought to be an accumu- 
lation far more regular, more cautious, and more open to 
general social aims. But it is secured. And accumulation 
is the condition precedent of social well-being and of civilisa- 
tion itself. But, under the Socialist scheme, all accumula- 
tion would be left to depend on the votes of those who, ex 
hypothesis have no turn for accumulation at all, who under 
the pressure of daily needs could not be induced to provide 
for the future, who have no training in business, and who 
would be open to all the motives which are wont to play 
upon popular impatience. 

Under such a state of things, we may look forward to an 
industrial chaos and material collapse, such as Europe has 
not seen since the Early Middle Ages. A stoppage of neces- 
sary accumulation would mean what the absence of all 
reservoirs would mean in a season of drought. Production 



444 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

would everywhere be paralysed; business would cease; 
and consequently wages would not be paid. It is difficult 
to see how famines on a gigantic scale could be averted. 
For, even if the property of the rich were confiscated and 
divided, it would not feed millions of workmen. The parks, 
mansions, furniture, hot-houses, gardens, horses, and car- 
riages of the capitalists would neither feed nor clothe the 
poor; and in the midst of a universal material crash, they 
would be neither useful nor saleable. At present, our thirty 
millions of people buy food from abroad with the cotton, 
iron, coal, ships, woollens, and so forth which they make or 
raise. They cannot make cotton, iron, ships, and so forth 
as men can dig up potatoes, nor without enormous accumu- 
lated funds to provide them with costly machinery, and to 
pay the wages during the long interval that must elapse 
between digging up the coal in the pit and the receipt of 
payment from the foreigner for the manufactured iron. 
And if the workmen, in deference to a specious theory, 
choose to destroy the very sources of accumulation, the 
inevitable result must be — a prolonged era of starvation, 
quite appalling in its severity and in its extent. 

There remains all the wide field of the intolerable personal 
tyranny which any scheme of Socialism inevitably involves. 
We hear little now on this side of the question; because 
the elaborate codes for the regulation of human life, so 
common in the early years of the century, have long become 
obsolete and forgotten. The despotism of Socialism does 
not so much alarm people now, simply because Socialism 
now is presented in a thoroughly vague and inorganic form. 
If, as was said half in jest and half in earnest, "we are all 
Socialists now," it is also true that Socialism now means 
anything or everything. Many people fancy they are 
Socialists when they only desire to see some well-meant 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 445 

Bills for the protection of workmen passed by Parliament. 
Legislation about hours of labour, the state purchase of 
railways and docks, model farms and lodgings maintained 
by taxes, and the like — all this is a mere playing at Socialism. 
I read through that aesthetic but hazy work called Fabian 
Essays, without rinding more than half-a-dozen really 
Socialist proposals, or more than one real Socialist writer. 

But if Socialism is to reorganise Industry, it must mean 
the systematic, stern, and universal suppression of private 
capital and wealth by law. There is one eccentric apostle 
of this creed, who seems to combine with it the suppression 
of the Family, and of most other institutions of civilised 
man. If Socialism is really to regenerate industry, it must 
abolish capital, wages, property in all forms, and it can 
only do so by law. The serious Socialists, of times when 
Socialism was not an aesthetic fad, but a Social Gospel of 
consuming passion, all devised elaborate schemes for forcing 
men's lives into cast-iron formulas, in order to keep capital 
in the state of a proscribed and illegal institution. They 
were quite right. Unless capital be sternly and universally 
suppressed by law, unless the family life, the personal life, 
the social life of all citizens equally be prescribed by law, 
as Lycurgus, Babceuf, Fourier, and Owen projected it, 
Capital will maintain itself and make Socialism a mere 
impracticable experiment. If there is to be Socialism at 
all, serious enough to recast the conditions of labour, it 
must be an inexorable scheme of legal compulsion : affecting 
us all in our homes, in our social habits, and in the entire 
disposal of our personal life. 

What an appalling prospect of tyranny does this open 
to the vision! The development of man's individual 
capacities, the moral beauty of domestic life, the progress 
of science, of art, of learning, of religion — all depend on 



446 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

a due measure of individual freedom. But individual 
freedom is absolutely dependent on the free command of 
a certain amount of individual capital. A man can now 
devote himself to a long career of unremunerative study, 
by reason that he or his parents may have accumulated 
enough to maintain him in comfort. An artist can work 
out ideas which the public has not learned to value, by 
reason that a few rich men give him a fancy price for pieces 
that they like. A man can devote himself to politics, to 
education, to religious, social, or moral reformation, because 
he has just enough income to dispense with daily toil at a 
trade. The whole progress of civilisation lies there : — 
inventions, learning, art, poetry, philosophy, reformation. 

Suppress capital and place all accumulations not at the 
free disposal of individuals, but at the mercy of meetings 
or boards of labourers, and what chance would there be of 
a student, a poet, or a moralist obtaining an order for free 
living? Let us imagine Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, 
Burne Jones, or Thomas Carlyle appearing before the 
department of education to ask for a dispensation from 
labour, in order to devote themselves to biology, poetry, 
painting, or letters! They would be driven out of the 
Board-room as idle malingerers. It is sometimes suggested 
that the student, the artist, or the teacher would be duly 
supported by the public appreciation of their merits; so 
that a popular painter or writer would immediately receive 
a state pension. That is to say, that art, science, literature, 
and education would pass into the hands of those who best 
could hit the passing fancy of the untrained public of the day. 

It is quite needless to enlarge on the myriad forms of 
tyranny which true Socialism implies, because Socialism 
now presents itself only in a disguise which might serve 
as a costume for a Court Ball. Our attention is not called 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 447 

to the despotism of life that true Socialism involves, simply 
because there is now hardly any [true Socialism before us. 
But it is not the less true that Property, or personal appro- 
priation of Capital, is the sole condition of personal freedom. 
It is quite true that the freedom is now brutally and cynically 
abused by the Capitalist, but it remains true all the same, 
and is an eternal axiom of human society : — without per- 
sonal appropriation there can be no personal freedom. 

It must also be remembered that, in the scheme of Socialism 
the humblest workman would feel the despotism of the State 
quite as much as the great capitalist whom he is to depose. 
The poorest workman to-day has a certain amount of freedom 
before him, when he has got his week's wages in his pocket. 
But under a strict system of Socialism, he would not be 
free to change his home, or his residence, or his trade, or 
dispose of his children, as he chose. The simplest detail 
of his life would have to be fixed by order of some Board. 
Why? Because a man can do nothing freely without some 
sort of accumulation. And, if you suppress all accumulation, 
you render a man as helpless as a slave. If you suppress 
accumulation on principle you must suppress all accumula- 
tion — even £5 in a workman's pocket. 

Thus, then, we come to the conviction that Property, 
like Family, like Government, like the separation of pro- 
fessions and functions, is a permanent, essential, indispensable 
element in all civilised societies. It has been cruelly per- 
verted and abused; it has worked an enormous amount 
of evil; it has aroused a great force of just indignation by 
its misdoings. The real answer is not its annihilation; 
but its reformation: its complete regeneration by moral 
and religious, and not by mechanical and legal agencies. 
Governments also have frightfully abused their powers. 
But only Anarchists ask us to abolish government, rather 



448 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

than to control it. The problem of the future is to change 
the mode in which capital shall be used, not the persons by 
whom capital shall be held. Appropriation, in truth, is 
the condition antecedent of all civilisation. 

Limited and qualified appropriation, I say. For we 
entirely agree that the unlimited and unqualified appro- 
priation which now passes current as property in Capital, 
is an anti-social, inhuman, and barbarous form of tyranny. 
Limited by whom? Qualified by what? Limited by the 
whole force of public opinion, by law, and by the voice 
of the commonwealth expressed in a thousand modes! 
Qualified by religion, and a really social education, by the 
rise of a new morality, and by a set of social institutions 
which will impress on the conscience the paramount sense 
of duty from the cradle to the grave. These modes of 
economic reform, these types of Socialism, offer no new 
resources from religion — no education, no moral scheme, 
no social institutions whatever. They rely exclusively on 
bare redistribution in the material things, on a simple re- 
adjustment in the right to capital. The real evils are moral, 
social, religious, and only partly material. The deeper 
source of the suffering, cruelty, and oppression about us 
lies in human selfishness — selfishness which takes as many 
forms as Proteus, which is as subtle as the serpent that be- 
guiled our first parents ; and which is able to elude a thousand 
laws. How are we going to cure or mend human selfishness ? 
For if we leave this rampant, new laws, and bare material 
reforms, and the shifting the limits of appropriation, can 
have but a passing or doubtful result. 

Our answer is plain. We believe that selfishness j :an 
fys-XUTfid only by Religion — by a social religion, t he aim 
of which is not to lard the beli ever in Heave n but to reform 
human nature upon earth. Religion has never fairly set 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SOCIALISM 449 

itself to that direct object, though incidentally it has done 
much to promote it, often without intending it, and some- 
times in spite of its own dogmatic precepts. Once make 
religion the dominant force in human life, make the sole 
business of religion to moralise men, to control self-interest 
and to purify society, and we shall have a power equal to 
cope with all extant forms of human selfishness. Those 
who mock at our hopes that this, after all, is the only remedy 
against social oppression, have but little true sense of the 
enormous power of a really social religion. Even in its 
forms of fictitious abstraction and celestial dreams, Religion 
has been strong enough to conquer some of the deepest 
vices of our imperfect nature, and to stimulate the develop- 
ment of 'the sublimest virtues. 

If the tribal God of Israel, or the mythology of Greece 
and Rome, could call out such great qualities in the Hebrew, 
the Greek, the Roman race; if the passion for godliness 
in Paul and his companions could overcome the lust and 
frivolity of the ancient world; if the Catholic discipline at 
its best could so deeply transform the ferocity and turbulence 
of mediaeval Europe, we need not doubt the power of a truly 
social Religion to subdue the, certainly less desperate, evils 
of modern industrial life. Human nature and society both 
have a subtle and complex unity, and are only to be radically 
regenerated by a complete treatment of their needs as wide 
as human nature and society themselves. We must re- 
generate domestic life, personal life, moral life, social life, 
political life, religious life, and not manufacturing and 
trading life alone. 

We need a reformed education, resting on a scientific 
philosophy, revised and purified domestic manners, a new 
series of social institutions, a reformed and new common- 
wealth. But above all we need a reformed Religion — 



450 NATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 

social in its origin, in its object, and in its methods ; human, 
practical, and scientifically true. The religion of Humanity 
affords us all this, and will prove equal to the mighty task 
of regenerating even our corrupt industrial system, for it 
will have a double aspect : the one spiritual, the other material, 
but both entirely human and real. It will be on one side 
of it a social religion: on the other side of it a religious 
Socialism. 



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